Over the past 12 months, large-scale acquisitions of farmland in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia have made headlines in a flurry of media reports across the world. Lands that only a short time ago seemed of little outside interest are now being sought by international investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of hectares.

The implications of this are discussed in the Columbia FDI Perspectives on topical foreign direct investment issues seried by the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment No. 8, June 22, 2009.