Last August Hassad Food, a year-old agricultural finance company owned by the government of Qatar, announced that the tiny Middle East emirate’s primary food security investment group would change its funding strategy. Instead of securing its food supply principally by purchasing tens of thousands of acres of arable land in Africa, Asia, and Europe – a global trend that has stirred international concern and a grassroots backlash in some of the planet’s poorest agricultural regions — Hassad Food would invest in food and farm companies…

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