The below excerpts were taken out of the following article, "Land Grabbing: All In the Name of Food Security?" at https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/land-grabbing-all-name-food-security.
“A very disturbing finding has come to light recently regarding the involvement of speculation in this whole picture. Oakland report shows a major role of western firms, wealthy US and European individuals, and investment funds with ties to major banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Investors include not only alternative investment firms like the London-based Emergent Asset Management but also universities such as Harvard, Spelman, and Vanderbilt – with a primary motivation of economic access to agricultural land that will have high returns for the endowment.
A report by the High Level Panel of experts headed by Dr. MS Swaminathan suggests that “many land deals have not been followed by productive investment, with only 20% of investments that have been announced actually being followed through with agricultural production happening on the ground. Speculation might be one of the reasons for that. It is however difficult to say how much international investment in land can be classed as speculative”. Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, said in a statement, “The same financial firms that drove us into a global recession by inflating the real estate bubble through risky financial maneuvers are now doing the same with the world’s food supply.”
Also, worrying is the presence of pointers which allude to a possible carbon finance linkage in these land acquisitions. “The CDM in Africa: marketing a new land grab”, prepared by the Gaia Foundation examines the threats posed by misuse of CDM markets via land grab in Africa.”
“The leading players, especially in the context of acquisitions in Africa, are China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, United States of America, Kuwait, and India (not necessarily in order).”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2011/03/31/the-cdm-and-africa-marketing-a-new-land-grab/ states, "However there is increasing pressure for Africa to initiate more CDM projects. This is based on a widespread assumption that Africa’s large unpopulated territories make it ideal for CDM projects that use extensive areas of land. Increasingly, Africa is coming under pressure to use its territory for CDM tree plantation projects and biofuels. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations, there are proposals to further broaden the range of projects that are eligible for CDM, to include GM crops and addition of biochar to soils as greenhouse gas emission offset projects."