onValues has released "The Responsible Investor's Guide to Commodities", a report aimed to help institutional investors navigate the environmental, social and governance challenges of commodities-related investments, including farmland.
Bloomberg's Alan Katz reports on Morgan Stanley's farming venture on the steppes of Ukraine which it abandoned in July 2009. The failed gamble demonstrates how Wall Street firms, in the last gasp of a debt-fueled bull market, strayed further from their traditional businesses to embrace diverse projects with unfamiliar risks.
In Brazil, government surveys found foreigners owned 10% of the nation's cultivated land. Much of that was funds with international backing in London or New York.
A small but growing number of the world's wealthy are shoring up their portfolios with investments in forestry and farmland in an effort to take the sting from losses in more traditional assets as the financial crisis trundles on.
It has been reported that the Tanzania Investment Centre has partnered with the country's prison service to market the latter’s 130,000 hectares of land to investors.
With famine hitting the horn of Africa, the European Parliament holds a full-day hearing on food security challenges in developing countries, looking at EU policies, sustainable farming, commodity speculation, land grab and other key food-related issues.
Black River Capital Partners Fund (Food) LP, a fund managed by the private equity arm of US agribusiness and trading giant Cargill, has offered to acquire 28.11 percent of Philippine fruit and vegetable grower AgriNurture Inc. for $30.4 million.
CDC, the UK’s development finance institution, today announced a US$20m investment in farming businesses in Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Uganda
Since Monday evening more than a hundred land owners are blocking the Socfin operation area
The bursting of the river banks of Baro and Alwero has resulted in the submergence of the crop, adding a loss of hope for producing a sizeable maize crop by Karuturi.
“The threat of 'land grabbing’ has reminded us how vital access to land is for 500 million food-insecure households around the world,” says Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food.
Sir Michael Fay, his mainly Maori colleagues, and the rival Chinese bidders for the Crafar dairy farms, have one thing in common. In a world where global investors are all looking for safe havens for their money, they see New Zealand farmland as good buying.
