OVERVIEW: The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is a landlocked country situated in Southeast Asia, bordering Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Myanmar. Despite a recent increase in the rate of urbanization and a relatively small amount of arable land per capita, most people in Lao PDR live in rural areas and work in an agriculture sector dominated by subsistence farming. Lao PDR’s economy relies heavily on its natural resources, with over half the country’s wealth produced by agricultural land, forests, water and hydropower and mineral resources.

OVERVIEW: Thailand is facing the challenges of a transition from lower- to upper-middle-income status. After decades of very rapid growth followed by more modest 5–6% growth after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Thailand achieved a per capita GNI of US $3670 by 2008, reduced its poverty rate to less than 10% and greatly extended coverage of social services. Infant mortality has been cut to only 13 per 1000, and 98% of the population has access to clean water and sanitation.

The structure of ownership of agricultural land, despite of the developing market with agricultural land in recent years, has not changed considerably. Most of agricultural land in Slovakia is, even after 6 years from the entry of Slovakia into the EU, leased. According to the Structural census of farms (2001), the lease of agricultural land represents 96%, in 2010 it was 91% (EUROSTAT, 2010).

Rapid growth of emerging economies, emerging interest in biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels and recent volatility in commodity prices have led to a marked increase in the pace and scale of foreign and domestic investment in landbased enterprises in the global South. Emerging evidence of the negative social and environmental effects of these large-scale land transfers and growing concern from civil society have placed ‘global land grabs’ firmly on the map of global land use change and public discourse. Yet what are the processes involved in these large-scale land transfers?

Brief summary of 4 presentations at the Mokoro land seminar by Martin Adams (Mokoro) on FAO’s support for tenure, rights and access to land and natural resources: lessons from Mozambique; by Joseph Hanlon (LSE) on The Mozambique land grab myth; by Elizabeth Daley (Mokoro) on Current issues around gender and land; and by Joss Saunders (Oxfam) on Engaging in strategic litigation and working with lawyers on land, gender and access to justice.

Includes introduction, context, land deals (extent, nature and origins), key issues (land availability, consultations, compensation, agrofuels), impacts (food security, water, social and political effects), conclusions – major challenges include lack of information and coordination, secrecy and flaws in the investment processes, need for transparency and open debate.

Includes country context, legal and institutional frameworks, 4 case studies. The new government of South Sudan has begun promoting large-scale private investments as a shortcut to rapid economic development. Recent major land deals threaten to undermine the land rights of local communities. Lack of a regulatory framework encourages opportunistic companies and is a potential source of future conflicts. Need to place limits on land-based investment until an appropriate regulatory framework is in place.

Includes Mozambique – war, land and poverty; land law, investors and peasants; land concessions – forests, agrofuels and other crops; are reckless land investment deals over? Traces the history of previous land concessions. A current intense debate on the proper balance between small and large-scale, foreign and domestic investment, food and other crops. Civil society and peasant organizations have successfully exposed many failures relating to recent land investments and are now working to register community lands.

La pregunta que guió este trabajo fue ¿Cuáles son los resultados de las entregas directas de tierras realizadas por el INCORA por medio de la expedición de la Ley 160 de 1994? A partir de esta pregunta, el objetivo fundamental que se trazó fue analizar dos entregas de tierras realizadas por el INCORA en el municipio de Córdoba, Quindío en el marco de la Ley 160 de 1994. Este análisis se hizo desde el punto de vista de diferentes visiones teóricas y de historia política, social y económica que se han tenido sobre el problema de la distribución de la propiedad rural en Colombia.

Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory.

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige.

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people’s land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people’s relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders’ access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced.