ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: This paper traces the implications of key agrarian transformations −particularly the reforms in land policy and emerging land relations− for livelihood security and vulnerability. Part of a broader societal transformation and globalization of economies, these new development trajectories include commercialization of farmers’ produce, contract farming, cooperative sector reform, rising landlessness and tenant farming, and the end of exclusive dependence on land for earning a living.

Myanmar's agricultural economy has been under transition from a planned to a market system since the late 1980s and has experienced a substantial increase in production. However, little research is available on the impact of economic policies in this country on agricultural production decisions and rural incomes. Therefore, this paper investigates the impact using a micro dataset collected in 2001 and covering more than 500 households in eight villages with diverse agro-ecological environments.

The paper documents how the implementation of the land tenure policy of the Vietnamese government has affected the agricultural system, livelihood strategies and food self-sufficiency of Thai farmers in a remote upland village, Que, in Nghe An Province, North Central Vietnam. It is shown that the enforcement of restrictions on the area under swidden agriculture has resulted in a strong reduction of swidden agriculture production and shortened fallow periods, not compensated for by the slow increase in paddy rice production.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS: Over the past several years, the enormity of the environmental challenges facing the Mekong River Delta region of southern Vietnam has become increasingly clear. Climate change and dam construction on the upper reaches of the Mekong threaten to disrupt the flow of the river, making both droughts and floods ever more common. Meanwhile, the rapid intensification of rice agriculture in the Mekong Delta and the export-oriented cultivation of farmed fish and shrimp have increasingly strained.

Sudden and gradual land use changes can result in different socio-ecological systems, sometimes referred to as regime shifts. The Lao PDR (Laos) has been reported to show early signs of such regime shifts in land systems with potentially major socio-ecological implications. However, given the complex mosaic of different land systems, including shifting cultivation, such changes are not easily assessed using traditional land cover data. Moreover, regime shifts in land systems are difficult to simulate with traditional land cover modelling approaches.

Despite the increasing acknowledgment of scholars and practitioners that many large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in developing countries fail or never materialize, empirical evidence about how and why they fail to date is still scarce. Too often, land deals are portrayed as straightforward investments and their success is taken for granted. Looking at the coffee sector in Laos, the authors of this article explore dimensions of the land grab debate that have not yet been sufficiently examined.

Political transitions often trigger substantial environmental changes. In particular, deforestation can result from the complex interplay among the components of a system—actors, institutions, and existing policies—adapting to new opportunities. A dynamic conceptual map of system components is particularly useful for systems in which multiple actors, each with different worldviews and motivations, may be simultaneously trying to alter different facets of the system, unaware of the impacts on other components.

Agricultural large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) is a process that is currently not captured by land change models. We present a novel land change modeling approach that includes processes governing LSLAs and simulates their interactions with other land systems. LSLAs differ from other land change processes in two ways: (1) their changes affect hundreds to thousands of contiguous hectares at a time, far surpassing other land change processes, e.g., smallholder agriculture, and (2) as policy makers value LSLA as desirable or undesirable, their agency significantly affects LSLA occurrence.

Land use decision making is influenced by various factors including tenure security, natural disasters and farm characteristics. Smallholder farmers operate under different land tenure systems, which influences their crop combinations. This paper investigates smallholder farmers’ crop combinations under different land tenure systems in Thailand in the context of the 2011 flood and government policy on rice.

This paper explores assumptions about the drivers of forest cover change in a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) context in the Lam Dong Province in Vietnam. In policy discourses, deforestation is often linked to'poor' and 'ethnic minority' households and their unsustainable practices such as the expansion of coffee production (and other agricultural activities) into forest areas.

Labor migration and large-scale land enclosures are increasingly central to the story of agrarian change throughout the Global South. Nonetheless, there remain limited understandings of how recent explosions of mobile labor and new sources of smallholder capital shape and are shaped by ongoing land use and property transformations. This article reviews this gap in Southeast Asia – a region where labor and capital are highly mobile and where the expansion of industrial agriculture and forestry has been particularly rapid.

This paper deepens the economic analysis of the effects of land consolidation – reduction of land fragmentation. It does this in the context of rural Vietnam, studying whether land consolidation promotes or hinders the Vietnamese government's policy objectives of encouraging agricultural mechanization and stimulating the off-farm rural economy. The analysis views land consolidation as a form of technical change, making it possible to apply the rich insights developed in the economic literature on that subject.