The German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) invites submissions for an international conference on large-scale agricultural investments on 11 May 2012 in Hamburg, Germany.
As the global financial downturn pushes investors into finding alternative business ventures, land investment has become an attractive proposition.
Ardhi University (Tanzania) and its partners, the UNU School for Land Administration Studies of the University of Twente (Netherlands) and MKURABITA (President’s Office, Tanzania), are organizing a one day national seminar on Land Grabbing in Tanzania.
Group's $700 million international crop fund has been dealt a serious blow with new foreign investment restrictions on rural property in Brazil stalling its expansion.
City Energy & Infrastructure will be involved in the development of a sugar plantation and sugar processing plant in an area of 100,000 hectares.
Egyptian private equity firm Citadel Capital, which has leased 259,500 acres for farming in Unity state, is among dozens of foreign entities to have struck large land deals in the new country.
"It is profoundly distressing to learn of numerous rural communities being evicted from their ancestral lands in the headwaters and upper floodplains of great rivers like the Nile and Niger to make way for export-oriented estates," says Prince.
"I wonder if greater returns could come for Africa if attention were paid to backing the continent’s millions of smallholders? And yet, as I speak, many are being driven off their land and swelling the ranks of the urban dispossessed."
"Because of the nation's limited agricultural resources, we have to look overseas," Jiang Hua, a COFCO board member said. The company is trying to connect China's consumer market with overseas supplies of commodities such as sugar, wheat and soybeans.
The Brazilian government's decision to block major foreign land purchases from August 2010 has had a very real impact: prices for lots larger than 3,000 hectares have fallen by 10% or more over the past year, depending on the region.
Multinational corporations are buying enormous tracts of land in Africa, putting countries on the path to increased food insecurity, environmental degradation, increased reliance on aid and marginalisation of farming and pastoralist communities.
The West African nation of Liberia is rich is oil, diamonds and timber, but these natural resources have been both a blessing and a challenge for the fledgling democracy.
