What rural dwellers in the Global South experience as land grabbing, tends to be seen in the Global North as ‘agricultural investment’. The World Bank has been at the forefront of a drive to legitimate these investments, convening to win support for a code of conduct based on Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles. Many key civil society groups reject the proposal for a code of conduct, objecting to the top-down process by which it was formulated and arguing that it was more likely to legitimate than prevent land grabbing.

Unregistered ancestral lands and those under shifting cultivation will be protected under draft policy and protected from confiscation under under a draft land use policy, a change land rights groups say would be a major step forward for tenure security.

A network of land-focused civil society organisations has raised concerns that bylaws for two new pieces of land legislation fail to offer proper protection for upland farmers who use shifting cultivation, leaving millions at risk of losing their land tenure rights.

Land Core Group chairman U Shwe Thein said that the recently introduced bylaw for the Farmland Law interprets taungya, or upland farming, as only fields under permanent cultivation. This leaves farmers who practise upland shifting cultivation with little protection from losing their lands...

This website contains mainly news reports about the global rush to buy up or lease farmlands abroad as a strategy to secure basic food supplies or simply for profit. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring or researching the issue, particularly social activists, non-government organisations and journalists.

The Farmland Law and the VFV Law were approved by Parliament on March 30th, 2012. There have
been a few improvements compared to previous laws such as recognition of
non-rotational taungya as
a legitimate land-use and recognition that farmers are using VFV lands without formal recognition by
the Government. However overall the Laws lack clarity and provide
weak protection of the rights of
smallholder farmers in upland areas and do not explicitly state the equal rights
of women to register

Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, see investment in foreign farmland as an important new source of revenue. As a result, fertile agricultural land is becoming increasingly privatised and concentrated.

Abstract:
Millions of people from Burma have migrated into neighboring countries over the past decade.
Most have left their country in search of security and safety as a direct result of internal conflict
and militarization, severe economic hardship and minority persecution. This exodus represents
one of the largest migration flows in Southeast Asia.
Fearing persecution, the vast majority of those migrating from Burma find themselves desperate
to survive, obtaining work in underground and, often, illegal labor markets. The majority of those

GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. Our support takes the form of independent research and analysis, networking at local, regional and international levels, and fostering new forms of cooperation and alliance-building. Most of our work is oriented towards, and carried out in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

A global coalition of 14 Partners and over 120 international, regional and community organizations advancing forest tenure, policy, and market reforms.....

Core Beliefs:

"Based on our experience, we find that empowerment of rural people and asset-based development are part of a process that is dependent on a set of enabling conditions, including security of tenure to access and use natural resources. As a coalition of diverse and varied organizations, RRI is guided by a set of core beliefs...

Rights of Poor Communities Must Be Recognized and Strengthened:

1. Introduction;
1.1. Background;
1.2. Project Profile;
1.3. Project Objectives;
2. The Participatory Action Research (PAR) Process;
2.1. Methods of Working with Migrant Children and Youth;
2.2. Implementation Strategy;
2.3. Ethical Considerations;
2.4. Research Team;
2.5. Sites and Participants;
2.6. Establishing Research Guidelines;
2.7. Data Collection Tools;
2.8. Documentation;
2.9. Translation;
2.10Country and Regional Workshops;

Securing land rights for the world’s poorest people"...
MISSION:

"Landesa works to secure land rights for the world’s poorest people– those 2.47 billion* chiefly rural people who live on less than two dollars a day. Landesa partners with developing country governments to design and implement laws, policies, and programs concerning land that provide opportunity, further economic growth, and promote social justice...
VISION:

Date of adoption, 24 February 2012. Date of publication 25 February...We are not 100% sure if this English version is of the adopted law or if there were amendments...this version is a bit blurry with Firefox. Try Chrome or IE.