Japan has steadily prepared for food security by buying 12 million hectares of croplands around the world, from Southeast Asia and China to South America. By comparison, the amount of Korea’s overseas croplands is negligible.

Liu Jianjun, a former Chinese government official who runs the Baoding-Africa business council, has contracts to farm 10,000 acres in Uganda, to build a cornflour processing factory in Kenya and for a farm project in the Ivory Coast.

The Moroccan government has pursued a strategy of leasing state-farms previously under the management of Société de Développement Agricole (SODEA). A large number of bids were made by agricultural businesses from France, Egypt, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.

Since 1999, The Ingleby Company has bought about 17 farms. The company runs just under 20,000ha of land with 130,000 stock units, most of which are sheep and cattle.

The Solvent Extraction Association, currently visiting South America, will come up with a techno-feasibility report on carrying out contract farming by Indian companies either in Argentina, Paraguay or Uruguay.

“There’s no harm in allowing [Chinese] farmers to leave the country to become farm owners [in Africa],” the head of China’s Export-Import Bank, Li Ruogu, says.

Libya plans to invest in the production of wheat in Ukraine on a surface of 100.000 hectares, in order to provide for the totality of its requirements

Brazilian grain broker Multigrain SA has bought 100,000 hectares of farmland and related operations in Brazil to secure a stable supply of soybeans and other farm produce, Japan's Mitsui & Co Ltd, a part owner of holding company Multigrain AG, said on Tuesday.

Agricultural land trusts and corporate players may take a bigger chunk of Australia's arable land with global market dynamics making rural land purchases more attractive investments.

A military-driven Chinese hybrid rice-for-opium crop-substitution program in the northern part of Myanmar's Shan state has resulted in four consecutive years of poor harvests and driven many ethnic-minority farmers into heavy debt or out of rice farming altogether.

In 2006, Beijing and Maputo signed a memorandum of understanding concerning the creation of a massive agricultural project in the Zambezi river valley area.

China’s global scramble for natural resources is leading to a transformation of agricultural trading around the world.