At the turn of the 21st century, farmland was still considered an investment backwater by most of the financial sector. Although some insurance companies have had farmland holdings for years, most financial investors found farmland, and agricultural investment in general, unappealing compared to the much higher returns to be made in financial markets.

Introduction: Farmland, A Safe Investment in Troubling Financial Times

28 May 2014

GRAIN | La Vía Campesina

For immediate release

Enhanced transparency, accountability, and government or donor responsiveness to people needs are imperative to achieve better and more sustainable development results on the ground. The rapid spread of new technologies is transforming the daily lives of millions of poor people around the world and has the potential to be a real game changer for development.

Friends of the Earth’s report, ‘What’s your pension funding? How UK institutional investors finance the global land grab’, highlights the investments of UK institutional investors, such as British Airways Pension Fund, Legal & General and Standard Life, in companies accused of grabbing land, destroying the environment, and undermining sustainable livelihoods.

This briefing paper makes the case for proactive business engagement in respecting land rights and ensuring legal, fair and inclusive practices on land use, access to natural resources and equitable development opportunities. It outlines key challenges, provides an overview of existing instruments that can help companies address issues related to land, and points to practical entry points for improved business practices.

This study attempts to identify the impacts of land tenure institutions on the efficiency of farm management based on a case study of smallholder rubber production in customary lands of Sumatra

This sourcebook is intended to be a
ready reference for practitioners (including World Bank
stakeholders, clients in borrowing countries, and World Bank
project leaders) seeking state-of-the-art information about
good land management approaches, innovations for
investments, and close monitoring for potential scaling up.
This sourcebook is divided into three parts: the first part
identifies the need and scope for sustainable land

This sourcebook is designed to be a
guide for developing and implementing land use, land-use
change and forestry (LULUCF) projects for the BioCarbon Fund
of the World Bank that meet the requirements for the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. Only
project types and carbon pools that are eligible for credit
under the CDM during the first commitment period (2008-2012)
are covered. With its user-friendly format, the sourcebook

The growing use of Payments for
Environmental Services (PES) for conservation has fostered a
debate on its effectiveness, but the few efforts to date to
assess the impact of PES programs have been hampered by lack
of data, leading to very divergent results. This paper uses
data from a PES mechanism implemented in Quindío, Colombia,
to examine the impact of PES on land use change. Alone among
all early PES initiatives, the Silvopastoral Project

The effectiveness of conservation
interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services
(PES) is often evaluated, if it is evaluated at all, only at
the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by
the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently
successful interventions may not result in long-term
conservation benefits, a problem known as that of
permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the

Livestock systems globally are changing
rapidly in response to human population growth,
urbanization, and growing incomes. This paper discusses the
linkages between burgeoning demand for livestock products,
growth in livestock production, and the impacts this may
have on natural resources, and how these may both affect and
be affected by climate change in the coming decades. Water
and land scarcity will increasingly have the potential to

The pattern of global land use has
important implications for the world's food and timber
supplies, bioenergy, biodiversity and other eco-system
services. However, the productivity of this resource is
critically dependent on the world's climate, as well as
investments in, and dissemination of improved technology.
This creates massive uncertainty about future land use
requirements which compound the challenge faced by