Background: The Himalayan country of Bhutan is typically an agrarian country with about 57% of the people depending on agriculture. However, farming has been constrained by the mountainous topography and rapid changes in environmental variabilities. With climate change, agricultural production and food security is likely to face one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century.

This paper was prepared within the “Cooperatives and their alternatives” component of the Agrarian Structures Initiative (ASI) which a regional program of FAO in Europe and Central Asia. This paper outlines some of the main issues influencing the development (or not) of farmer and rural organisations and presents in further detail the specific situation in Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. All three countries returned ownership of the majority of land to the rural population.

Armenia is a country that is very much characterized by agriculture – but Armenian rural life is marked by a deep crisis, as this current study shows.

The Global Programme 'Responsible Land Policy' (GPRLP) is part of the Special Initiative 'One World, No Hunger' of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), which aims to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.

Die Landnutzungsplanung hat in der Demokratischen Volksrepublik Laos eine lange Geschichte und wird
seit den 1990er Jahren landesweit in vielfältiger Form angewendet (Ling, 2017). Im Kern schafft die Landnutzungsplanung