This ADI study in collaboration with the Land Information Centre seeks to understand the relationship between land titling and poverty reduction in two sangkat of Prey Nup District, Sihanoukville Municipality.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Moving Out of Poverty Study (MOPS) is a first of its kind in Cambodia, one of 18 studies commissioned by the World Bank to examine poverty dynamics and trends. Conducted in 2004/05, the study revisited nine rural villages in which CDRI had conducted research in 2001, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the extent to which these villages and individual households had been able to move out of poverty and improve prosperity, or had experienced downward mobility and decline.

Land is the repository of memory and keeps traces of the past in the absence of a strong written tradition. It is perceived as an open book from which anyone can read and learn about local history: place names, old roads, legends and stories attached to places. For local people, bulldozing the landscape is seen as erasing their history, and disturbing social organisations and traditions. In Cambodia--as in many other countries--land is an extremely important economic resource and asset. Land is livelihood.

This participatory poverty assessment (PPA 2006) comprises one component of ADB’s Technical Assistance to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for Institutional Strengthening for Poverty Monitoring and Evaluation. The goal of this PPA, as with the first PPA in 2000, is to complement the statistical analyses of poverty in a meaningful way and to record the experiences and concerns of the poor in order to initiate and identify more effective forms of public and private actions to alleviate poverty.

In Cambodia, an increasing demand for land has accompanied rapid economic expansion over the past decade, leading to land tenure insecurity for many of the country's poor. Despite the adoption of a new land law in 2001 and the establishment of the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) in 2002, tenure problems have continued. The difficulties with land reform policy relate partly to LMAP's design problems and partly to poor execution.

Access to land for smallholder farmers is a critical foundation for food security in Myanmar's uplands. Land tenure guarantees seem to be eroding and access to land becoming more difficult in some upland areas. If this trend continues it may have negative impacts for food security and undermine environmental and economic sustainability. This briefing paper explores the relationship between land tenure and food security, as well as key institutional and other factors that influence land access and tenure for smallholder farmers in the uplands today.

Burma is situated in Southeastern Asia, bordering Bangladesh, India, China, Laos and Thailand. The majority of its population lives in rural areas and depends on land as a primary means of livelihood. Because all land in Burma ultimately belongs to the state, citizens and organizations depend upon use-rights, but do not own land. Burma’s laws grant women equal rights in some respects and also recognize certain customary laws that provide women equal rights in relation to land.

The research team set out to answer three research questions: 1) What are rubber investment’s key features with regard to the investment process, investor identity, location, activities and scale? 2) How was the “upland” landscape originally zoned and mapped as part of the LFA process, and later re-zoned and mapped by local authorities and foreign investors? 3) What are the impacts of rubber investment in upland areas on the land use and livelihoods of the villagers involved?

INTRODUCTION: The following report has been compiled to bring to the attention of a wider audience many of the problems facing the people of Burma, especially its many ethnic nationalities. For many outside observers, Burma’s problems are confined simply to the ongoing incarceration of Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s democratically elected leader, and many other political prisoners. However, as we hope to show in the following report, this is only one of very many human rights abuses that provide obstacles to the people’s hope for democracy.

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ABSTRACTED FROM SUMMARY: A bitter land struggle is unfolding in northern Burma’s remote Hugawng Valley. Farmers that have been living for generations in the valley are defying one of the country’s most powerful tycoons as his company establishes massive mono-crop plantations in what happens to be the world’s largest tiger reserve. The Hukawng Valley Tiger Reserve in Kachin State was declared by the Myanmar Government in 2001 with the support of the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: There is little evidence... that ordinary Cambodians are benefiting from the mass confiscation of their land. On the contrary, those who are displaced are explicitly excluded from any benefits, and instead find themselves facing loss of income, poor health, lack of education and other dire consequences that are directly opposed to the government’s public commitment to development, expressed through targets such as the “Millennium Development Goals” (MDG).