During the Millennium Summit of the United Nations (UN) in September 2000, 147 Head of States and Governments and 191 member-states adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration embodies structured development goals and targets. The adopting countries committed to achieve its targets to reduce poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women by 2015. Expert studies projected the resources required to attain the goals and what are expected to be available.

A short video documentary of AFA's participation (through its Indonesia member Aliansi Petani Indonesia or API) in activities organized by civil society organizations (CSOs) parallel to the conferences of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC), such as the thirteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 13) and the third session of the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 3), in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia last December 3-14, 2007. API has been invited by some CSOs who organized the parallel activities to UNFCC.

 It is well recognized that secure land and property rights for all are essential to reducing poverty because they underpin economic development and social inclusion. Secure land tenure and property rights enable people in urban and rural areas to invest in improved homes and livelihoods. Although many countries have completely restructured their legal and regulatory framework related to land and they have tried to harmonize modern statutory law with customary ones, millions of people around the world still have insecure land tenure and property rights.

In 1998 GIZ (former GTZ) published the “Guiding Principles on Land Tenure in Development Cooperation” in the form of a handbook. The publication enjoyed a warm reception and quickly became a source book among land experts and practitioners in Germany and abroad.

Since then the relevance, sensibility and complexity of land policy and land tenure issues have even increased, among other reasons, due to a new wave of strengthened interest in land and agriculture as an investment opportunity, a situation often referred to as “land grabbing”.

As indigenous peoples continue to gain more space in the UN system, the real challenge is ensuring the full recognition, respect, protection and exercise of their rights at all levels—and especially at the grassroots level. The UN system therefore needs to put into action its commitment in making the UN a “home” for indigenous peoples.

This is a Research of the resettlement village project is voluntary or not a voluntary.

Youth Bamboo Shoots Slum School (YBSSS) is a project of VFI Cambodia. 

The goal: to provide a safe and creative place for over 65 children to attend school in the dilapidated slum area near Battambang City's central railway station.

Laos remains one of the poorest countries in Asia and least developed in Southeast Asia, eighty per cent of Laos public investment programs are funded by foreign aid. We work with villages along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was bombed more heavily than any location on earth during the U.S.'s "Secret War" on Laos during the Vietnam War

Watch this BBC Earth Report about Laos PDR.

In Cambodia, the majority of the population is still composed of smallholder family farmers. 54% of the total labour force is employed in agriculture. They have access to 3.6 million ha of land, representing 19% of the country’s total land. The rest is divided between large scale economic land concessions (12%), public forests and protected areas, unclassified areas and some infrastructure.

This publication is a lobby material to advocate the passage of the National Land Use Act (NLUA). It highlights the ambiguous land policies and processes as factors to the degradation of watershed and protected areas in Cagayan de Oro and Northern Mindanao Region of the Philippines, resulting to extreme typhoon disasters. Thus, this paper explains how the NLUA will address such policy issues from the local development perspective of Northern Mindanao.

This issue brief is an abridged version of the VGGT discussion paper, "Review of Selected Land Laws and the Governance of Tenure in the Philippines: Discussion Paper in the context of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure (VGGT)" which  analyzes Philippine policies on land and resource tenure (as embodied in the 1987 Constitution and ten major laws on tenure)  

The Asia and Pacific region has witnessed a remarkable transition in the past 2 decades. From 1990 to 2012, more than 1 billion people in Asia and the Pacific were lifted out of extreme poverty. The region also witnessed rapid economic growth, which is expected to remain stable at a growth rate of about 5.7% for the next 2 years.