This BMZ comissioned report by GTZ highlights the dramatic increase of land concessions and rising inequality in land distribution in Cambodia. Parts of the study refer to an earlier report by Uch Sophas “Foreign Direct Investment in Land for Biomass Production in Cambodia”. The South-East Asian country Cambodia has an area of 181,035 km2.

As shown in this report, harassment of local activists in Cambodia, including defenders of the right to housing, is widespread. Cambodia’s rich and powerful are increasingly abusing the criminal justice system to silence communities standing up against land concessions or business deals affecting the land they live on or cultivate.

The transition to a market economy has sparked Vietnam's unprecedented urbanization and industrialization. In order to accommodate the spiraling land demand triggered by urban and economic growth, the Vietnamese government has been using the mechanism of compulsory acquisition at an astounding scale to convert massive amount of agricultural land to urban land for non-agricultural uses.

The research team set out to answer three research questions: 1) What are rubber investment’s key features with regard to the investment process, investor identity, location, activities and scale? 2) How was the “upland” landscape originally zoned and mapped as part of the LFA process, and later re-zoned and mapped by local authorities and foreign investors?

INTRODUCTION: The following report has been compiled to bring to the attention of a wider audience many of the problems facing the people of Burma, especially its many ethnic nationalities.

This study attempts to understand the impact of economic land concessions for agro-industrial production promoted by the government. This promotion heavily impacts on the locals’ livelihoods and obstructs decentralized natural resource management, especially in natural forest resources. They also examined locals’ response to such a development scheme.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: There is little evidence... that ordinary Cambodians are benefiting from the mass confiscation of their land.

Vietnamese land-tenure policy reforms were embedded into general economic reforms (Doi Moi), enabling the country’s transition toward a market economy. Since 1998, they were implemented incrementally together with complementary instruments such as agricultural market liberalization and new economic incentives.

Đổi Mới, the name given to the economic reforms initiated in 1986 in Vietnam, has renewed the party-state’s ambitious scheme of industrialization and has intensified the process of urbanization in Vietnam. A large area of land has been converted for these purposes, with various effects on both the state and society.

This paper seeks to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the resource frontier, drawing on examples of nature's commodification and enclosure under way in the peripheral Southeast Asian country of Laos.

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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.