The globally driven acquisition of land puts rural farmers across the globe at risk and Africa is the hotspot of global land grabbing. Shows the ongoing work of the Remote Sensing Research Group (RSRG), University of Bonn, to map land grabbing events in Southern Africa, with examples from Mozambique and Zambia. Provides an overview of current land grabbing databases, their lack of spatial information and how remote sensing datasets can overcome this lack when being used to detect large scale agricultural production schemes.