Over 7,800 acres of farmland in Salingyi Township, Sagaing Division, has been confiscated for a copper mine project with landowners forced out of their villages, according to local sources. A number of concerned residents told The Irrawaddy that grabbed lands belong to people in Salingyi’s Hse Te, Zee Daw, Wet Hmay and Kan Taw villages and authorities ordered residents to leave the area earlier this year. Most of the villagers do not want to relocate but some have already left, they claim.

Executive Summary: "This report is the culmination of a one year investigation by Amnesty International into alleged human
rights abuses by companies, including multinational companies, operating in Myanmar. The
report focuses on the Monywa copper mine project and highlights forced evictions, substantial
environmental and social impacts, and the repression, sometimes brutal, of those who try to protest.
It also raises serious questions about opaque corporate dealings and possible infringements of economic

While foreign governments heap praise on the Burmese government’s liberal tilt, land theft appears to be increasing as state agencies and powerfully placed domestic firms position themselves to welcome foreign investment.

Farmers across the country are being muscled out of their fields with little hope of appeal to the law. This is because despite all the trumpeting in the West about President Thein Sein’s “reforms,” the rule of law in Burma is closer to 12th Century Europe than the 21st Century.

Articles on this category from BurmaNet News

The purpose of the Mekong Land Research Forum online site is to provide structured access to published and unpublished research on land issues in the Mekong Region. It is based on the premise that debates and decisions around land governance can be enhanced by drawing on the considerable volume of research, documented experience and action-based reflection that is available.

Land grabs demonstrate disconnect between development discourse and practice:

As Myanmar’s opening economy is celebrated, rights activists warn it will see people who have lived in areas for generations forced out under ‘legal’ means that merely cover mercenary greed.

In the recent explosion of attention given to the land grabbing phenomenon, contract farming has been identified as a potentially inclusive alternative for smallholders to outright acquisition of farm land by agri-business capital. This paper responds to these claims by resituating contract farming as an equally important form of land control. The focus of the paper is a case study of potato contract farming in Maharashtra

Landjepik, diefstal van land, gebeurt vaak in Nederland. Een huiseigenaar trekt bewust maar onopgemerkt een strook gemeentegrond bij zijn tuin of verplaatst het hek op het land van zijn buurman. Een boer vergroot bewust zijn akker door een deel van de grond van zijn buurman bij zijn land te ploegen.

Soms bewust en soms onopgemerkt trekt iemand een stuk (gemeente)grond bij zijn tuin, onderhoudt dit jarenlang en behandelt het alsof het van hem is. Landjepik. Na twintig jaar verliest de originele eigenaar zijn eigendom en wordt de ‘dief ’ beloond voor zijn actie. Maar deze wijziging wordt nergens vastgelegd. De notaris kan dit dus niet zien als hij een woning overdraagt. Björn Hoops, promovendus en docent aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, brengt nu in kaart hoe groot dit probleem is.

This article focuses on how climate change mitigation policies and economic land and mining concessions in Prey Lang, Cambodia, accommodate and facilitate each other physically, discursively and economically. Maps and project descriptions reveal that climate-related policies and extraction coexist in the same landscape, even the same projects. Knowledge co-produced by the authors and affected individuals suggests that climate change mitigation initiatives are not only intimately linked to economic intensification in Prey Lang, but they also contribute to conflict and dispossession.

This paper focuses on one community in Cambodia that won back land from a large land deal by grabbing onto the rupture in property relations initiated by a one-year land titling campaign. I document the struggle between competing legibility and illegibility projects which I examine through two moments, one of the state choosing to see its population and their relations to territory, and another in which the state’s excuses for not recognizing smallholders’ claims began to falter.