Should rich countries — or investors based there — be buying agricultural land in developing countries?

That question is raised in Transnational Land Deals for Agriculture in the Global South, a report issued last year by the Land Matrix Partnership, a consortium of European research institutes and nongovernmental organizations.

The report shows that since 2000, investors or state bodies in rich or emerging countries have bought more than 83 million hectares of agricultural land in poorer developing countries. This amounts to 1.7 percent of the world's agricultural land.