In 1992 the Asian Development Bank coordinated a meeting between government representatives from China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam to discuss regional economic integration. From that meeting the Greater Mekong Subregion was formed to promote peace and prosperity within the Mekong countries. Yet, despite more than more than USD 14 billion being spent on facilitating trade, development and infrastructural ties between these nations, poverty remains widespread.

As BRICS-led foreign investment in agriculture has increased dramatically worldwide in recent years, China in particular, has begun to secure huge quantities of foreign land as an additional measure for securing future food and energy supplies. While an increasing amount of academic research has been conducted on the expansion of land deals in Latin America and Africa in recent years, Southeast Asian cases are just beginning to receive significant attention and have become the focus of some emerging academic and non-academic research.

WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This paper aims to provide keys that will help us understand contemporary land dynamics in these four countries. In order to do so it highlights their similarities and differences, both in the long history that shaped today’s local land situations and in more recent reforms implemented in the context of greater economic openness. The first part of the paper sets the cultural and historical context, with an overview of the diverse ways that the political authorities and different groups within the region have related to land.

Research indicates that key parameters of “land grabbing” differ across regions (e.g., ILC 2012) – particularly in view of who invests and/or when the bulk of investments occurred. At the same time, my review of the “land grab” literature since 2008 reveals that hardly any comparative assessments of “land grabbing” from a home country perspective exist that study whether and/or in which way and why “land grabs” of a single investor country differ across regions.

Over the last decade, the highlands of Ratanakiri province in northeastern Cambodia have witnessed massive land acquisitions and profound land use changes, mostly from forest covers to rubber plantation, which has contributed to rapidly and profoundly transform the livelihoods of smallholders relying primarily on family-based farming. Based on village- and households-level case studies in two districts of the province, this paper analyses this process and its mid-term consequences on local livelihoods. We first look at who has acquired land, where, how and at what pace.

Recent research highlights the potential for climate change mitigation projects and large-scale land deals to produce conflicts over land and resources. However, this literature generally views climate change policies and land grabbing as separate processes, and focuses on discrete areas where displacement or contested claims occur. We argue that additional research strategies are needed to understand the social and ecological spill-over effects that take place within larger areas where land-based climate change projects (e.g.

In rural Cambodia indiscriminate, illegitimate and often violent land grabs in the form of Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) have triggered myriad local responses by peasants facing evictions from private and communal lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Kratie and Koh Kong provinces, this chapter looks at the various forms of local resistance to government-sanctioned dispossession and displacement and discusses their effectiveness in bringing about socio-political and institutional change.

The granting of economic land concessions (ELCs) over large parts of Cambodia has begun to attract global attention. It has also become a key focal point for civil society mobilization in Cambodia as well as for transnational activism directed at targets both within and outside Cambodia.

Ever since the oil, financial and food crises of 2008, sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed a marked increase in large-scale investment in agricultural land. The drivers of this investment are varied and include growing food, water and energy insecurity as well as social and economic interests of investors and recipient countries. The shape of these investments and their eventual outcomes are equally influenced by the existing land and water governance systems in the host countries.

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.

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world’s rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession.

Over the past 10 years, transnational land grabs for rubber tree plantations have proliferated across Laos. Plantation concessions are being established on village lands that are represented as ‘degraded’ and legally classified as ‘state forests’, expropriated by government officials in the name of poverty alleviation with promises that plantations will provide new wage labour opportunities for those dispossessed.