Abstract:In the last two decades, the global interest on farmland grew at a remarkable pace. As a consequence, million hectares of land exchanged hands. The ways the transfers happened combined with their geographic concentration in Sub-Saharian Africa, have earned the phenomenon the name of "land grab". The agricultural sector considered a "sunset industry" when commodities prices were declining, is now attractive to financial investors. These foreign investments may be good as they may improve agricultural productivity or instead bad as they may benefit only financial investors. Some results in terms of environmental and local communities' worsening conditions have already emerged. This paper aims to investigate what drives the big size transfers of land, to empirically estimate their effects in terms of local employment and to assess the environmental effects produced by the rapid transformation in the use of vast amount of land in terms of CO 2 emissions. It is also proposed to use the estimation in terms of local employment impact as a way of distinguishing between foreign direct investment and land grabbing.