language or past colonial relationship) will need to be complemented with information on countries‘ dependence on food imports. This is dealt with in a straightforward way by using standard FAO figures.

Second, as the attractiveness of a country for farmland investment will depend on the availability of noncultivated land with high agro-ecological potential that is easily accessible, a measure for potential agroecological suitability of land, overlaid with current land use, is needed. Past attempts to measure the amount of land potentially available for agriculture suffered from conceptual and technical limitations (Young 2000, Ramankutty _et al._ 2008). If potentially suitable land is either covered by forest or home to traditional communities, much of what could potentially be available for agriculture may at the same time provide environmental and social benefits. A proper definition of potentially ―available‖ land will thus have to exclude protected areas, forests, and areas that are already occupied. To make this operational we use the agro-ecological potential for rainfed cultivation<sup>11</sup> as defined by the Global Agro-ecological Zoning project (Fischer et al. 2002). To make this information useful for our purpose, we overlay this with information on actual land use and population density drawing on a variety of databases<sup>12</sup> to derive a measure of land with high potential for rainfed cultivation that is currently not utilized and that excludes forests, protected areas, and areas with a population threshold above a certain maximum. Details of the methodology are discussed in Fischer and Shah (2010). Aggregate results, by region and for the world in total, are illustrated in Table 1. If defined this way, the area of total <mark>―available‖ land amounts to some 445 million ha, compared to about 1.5 billion ha already under cultivation (Deininger</mark> _<mark>et al.</mark>_ <mark>2011a). Most of this land is in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe (201, 123, and 52 million ha, respectively) although in the latter, relatively higher shares of land are in proximity to markets. As land availability is a key driver of the ―land rush‖, we expect this variable to be positive and highly significant.</mark> Third, while the link between foreign investment and governance has long been highlighted, special attention to land governance may be warranted.<sup>13</sup> To address this issue, we draw on three complementary indicators for general and land governance. First, we use the _Doing Business_ database which ranks the extent to which countries‘ legal and regulatory environment and uses the results to construct an index of ―weak investor protection‖.<sup>14</sup> A low value of this index reflects weak protection of investors‘ rights. A

> 11 We focus on rainfed cultivation as issues related to riparian rights and seasonal availability of water in a certain area as well as the investment needs for irrigation would require a more in-depth treatment.

> 12 Our measure of agricultural land outside the forest and protected areas is constructed from various bases, including Global Land Cover 2000 (http://www-gem.jrc.it/glc2000) PAGE Global Agricultural Extent (http://www. ifpri.org / dataset / pilot-analysis-global-Ecosystems-page), Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000 (http://www.fao.org/forestry/32203/en) and World Database on Protected Areas 2009 (http://www.wdpa.org / download.aspx). The extent of arable land outside forest and protected areas and in sparsely populated areas (that is to say less than 25 inhabitants per km2 or more than 4 ha per capita) uses LandScan 2003 Global Population (http://www .ornl.gov /Landscan/).

> 13 Key relevant aspects of land governance are the clarity with which rights are assigned and the accessibility of textual and spatial information on rights, the way in which state land is managed, disposed of, and acquired, the way land is taxed and land use is regulated, and the existence, accessibility, and impartial nature of institutions for conflict resolution (Deininger _et al._ 2011b).

> 14 The index consists of a weighted average of indices measuring the transparency of transactions, the liability of company directors and shareholders, and the power of administrators to hold directors accountable for misconduct. The underlying premise that excessive regulation and red tape deters investment and foster corruption is not uncontroversial and has been challenged because it only measures inputs but not the quality of public goods, e.g. property rights, provided (Arrunada 2007) and because it presumes an Anglo-Saxon model that may be less applicable in

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