The Lao Land and Forest Allocation Policy (LFAP) was intended to provide clearer property rights for swidden farmers living in mountainous areas. These lands are legally defined as “State” forests but are under various forms of customary tenure. The policy involves demarcating village territorial boundaries, ecological zoning of lands within village territories, and finally allocating a limited number of individual land parcels to specific households for farming.

Over the past decade, Laos has experienced a land rush by foreign investors seeking to gain large tracts of land for hydropower, mining, and plantation projects. The rapid pace of the phenomenon has prompted signif icant concern by international observers, Lao civil society, and certain sections of the government, regarding the impacts upon farmers that are dispossessed of their land and communal resources. However, both investors and peasant communities alike have differing experiences with the investment process.

Thirty years after Cambodia’s ‘democratization’ by the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC), the transition to a market-based economy is raging at full steam. Democracy remains elusive, but policy interventions from Cambodia’s “development partners” color the political, social, and environmental landscapes. This paper attends to the land grabs characteristic of market transitions and to the climate change mitigation strategies currently enhancing conflicts over land and resources in contemporary Cambodia.

Scholars have produced valuable insights on the question of recent “land grabbing” in the global South. They have, however, insufficiently studied the issue from below, particularly from the point of view of a crucial group in the land conundrum: the rural youth. This paper brings to the fore the perspectives of Laotian rural youngsters amidst a hasty agrarian transition, in which the borisat (company) –in the form of large monoculture plantations– has permeated both the physical landscape and the daily narratives of people.

In Laos land concessions have increased dramatically over the last decade. To provide a window into the concessions landscape, we conducted a nationwide inventory between 2007 and 2011. In response to an order by the Lao Government to its ministries, we developed a methodology to update the inventory and complement existing data with a systematic assessment of investment quality in 2014. We investigated aspects of compliance as well as impacts on livelihoods and the environment.

The scholarly debate around 'global land grabbing' is advancing theoretically, methodologically and empirically. This study contributes to these ongoing efforts by investigating a set of 'small-scale land acquisitions' in the context of a recent boom in banana plantation investments in Luang Namtha Province, Laos. In relation to the actors, scales and processes involved, the banana acquisitions differ from the state-granted large-scale land acquisitions dominating the literature on 'land grabbing' in Laos.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: In recent years, various actors, from big foreign and domestic corporate business and finance to governments, have initiated a large-scale worldwide enclosure of agricultural lands, mostly in the Global South but also elsewhere. This is done for large-scale industrial and industrial agriculture ventures and often packaged as large-scale investment for rural development.

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 article sheds light on how land conversion has resulted in farmers’ resistance and in what way and to what extent it has transformed their livelihoods in the transitional context of contemporary Vietnam.

This study assesses the economic implications of land ownership security in rural Thailand. It uses data from this country to rigorously analyze several aspects of land ownership security. It provides both qualitative and quantiative information on the effects of ownership security. The study presents a conceptual model and literature review and is followed by separate discussions on the evolution of land rights in Thailand; the study methodology and the nature of the data; and the credit market.

Land is an important source of identity and a precious asset with significant emotional connection in India. It is also the main source of rural and feudal power structure for most of India’s history. Land is a symbol of social status, cultural identity and an expression of political power. The value of land is deeply ingrained in the consciousness and well-being of the poor farmers and indigenous communities who make up a substantial portion of India’s total population.

Over the past few years, agribusiness, investment funds and government agencies have been acquiring long-term rights over large areas of farmland in lower income countries. It is widely thought that private sector expectations of higher agricultural commodity prices and government concerns about longer-term food and energy security underpin much recent land acquisition for agricultural investments. These processes are expected to have lasting and far-reaching implications for world agriculture and for livelihoods and food security in recipient countries.

This paper analyses the shifting role of South African farmers, agribusiness and capital elsewhere in the Southern African region and the rest of the continent. It explores recent trends in this expansion, and investigates the interests and agendas shaping such deals, and the ideologies and discourses of legitimation employed in favour of them. While for the past two decades small numbers of South African farmers have moved to Mozambique, Zambia and several other countries, this trend seems to be undergoing both a quantitative and a qualitative shift.