This article discusses two important concepts of food security and food sovereignty in the context of Vietnam’s post-reform economy. It examines Vietnam’s persistent choice of the food security framework, its resulting policies and their implications. The article argues that the choice of food security framework has served to justify the promotion of industrial agriculture and international trade. While this model has led to increased food productivity, it failed to guarantee access to and quality of food, the other two important pillars of the food security framework.

FIRST PARAGRAPH OF OVERVIEW: This paper is part of a study “Policy Analysis for the Development of Land Policy for Socio- Economic Development.” Land policy relates to the institutional arrangements through which the Government of Vietnam defines which individuals and groups have access to rights in land and the circumstances that apply to gaining and retaining that access.

Agricultural accumulation has been one of the main source determined the social differentiation in Vietnamese countryside. The complexities of agrarian changes under the post - socialist industrialization with high rate of agricultural land conversion in recent context reveal the new forms of capital accumulation and social differentiation. This research investigates how land conversion process to industrial zones and clusters affected to the way that different groups of peasant households accumulate their resources.

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.

In recent years the Lao government has provided many foreign investors with large-scale economic land concessions to develop plantations. These concessions have resulted in significant alterations of landscapes and ecological processes, greatly reduced local access to resources through enclosing common areas, and ultimately leading to massive changes in the livelihoods of large numbers of mainly indigenous peoples living near these concessions.

This paper attempts to define the factors which determine emigration and rice doublecropping, i.e. rice cultivation on the same plot twice per year, by rural households in Cambodia, and investigates whether these decisions influence each other using data from a two-period panel survey of 231 households in three provinces in rural Cambodia. In the analysis, we take into account possible correlation between these decisions (through estimating a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model) and unobserved heterogeneity among farmers (through estimating a random-effects probit model).

This 2010-11 Annual Development Review is the sixth annual review produced by CDRI on major development issues for Cambodia, and addresses several of the issues raised above.

The current study attempts to examine whether large-scale agricultural investment of this type benefits the poor and how this investment can be implemented to increase benefits for the poor. It is arguable whether the poor need more land to grow crops to meet their food security requirements or need to benefit from large-scale agricultural investment in Cambodia. Although the poor households are capable of operating small plots of a few hectares each, they generally lack capital and the means to work large chunks of new land with forests or degrade forests.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: Since đổi mới, Vietnam witnesses a rapid urbanization and industrialization, which leads to conversions of a large area of agricultural land and other types of land, and this has forced thousands of farmer households to change their traditional livelihoods and even their lives. Using the lens of a sustainable livelihoods framework, this study analyzes and explains the questions of how, in what ways and to what extent agricultural land conversions have been affecting farmer livelihoods in one peri-urban Hanoi village.

The Outlook is a diagnostic tool that provides a comprehensive overview of local development trends in Cambodia. It also discusses policy and governance reforms aimed at reducing disparities and exploiting the enormous potential of Cambodian territories. The report will be of interest to policy makers, Development Partners, researchers, NGOs and others interested in the dynamics of Cambodia’s economic and policy development.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: Lao PDR is the least densely populated country in Asia and has long been remote and isolated from the rest of the continent. This role has only recently begun to change. The geographic location of Laos between the booming economies of Thailand, Vietnam, and China has led to the perception of Laos as a potential crossroads of the tightly integrated GMS an organization promoting trade, tourism, and development between countries through which the Mekong River runs. However, this is a role it has been somewhat reluctant to accept.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: This is a study of the rice economy in Myanmar. It seeks to identify barriers and bottlenecks that are hindering growth and depressing value in a sector that must play a central role in alleviating the extreme poverty that currently afflicts an expanding proportion of rural households.