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.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: Women’s access to and control over land can potentially lead to gender equality alongside addressing material deprivation. Land is not just a productive asset and a source of material wealth, but equally a source of security, status and recognition. Substantive gender equality is both relational and multi-dimensional, cutting across race, class, caste, age, educational and locational hierarchies and can only be achieved if rights are seen as socially legitimate.

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. Frontiers are conceived as relational zones of economy, nature and society; spaces of capitalist transition, where new forms of social property relations and systems of legality are rapidly established in response to market imperatives.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE OPENING PARAGRAPHS: This article focuses not on the effects of corruption in Laos, on the Lao economy or the lives of individuals, but rather on what sustains it and makes it difficult to control, much less eradicate. In particular, it examines the political culture of corruption that has developed in the Lao PDR since its inauguration in 1975.

The Brazilian Amazon has 49.8 million hectares (Mha) of public forestlands not allocated by the federal or state governments to a specific tenure status: the so called undesignated public forests (UPF). Historically, these public forests have been vulnerable to land grabbers and land speculation. Here, we highlighted the imminent threat in UPF by quantifying their accumulated deforestation, all of which is illegal, for the period 1997–2018 and the potential illegal occupation.

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.

Land grabbing represents a fundamental problem in the transitional and post-transitional economies. The transfer of land property rights impose a dramatically change of agricultural production structure, including affecting the food safety and security. The main aim of this article is the analysis of the possible effects and transformation imposed by the transfer of land property in a post-transitional agricultural economy and to identify possible solution in valuing the lands as main production factors.

While nearly 80 percent of food consumed in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia is produced by smallholder farmers, the Bank negates the importance of small-scale farming for sustainable rural development and food security. Family farmers account for 80 percent of all holdings in the developing world, therefore smallholders’ own investments—not FDIs—are the main force sustaining agriculture and should be encouraged.

Up to 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands, which make up over 50 percent of the land on the planet; they legally own just one-fifth. The remaining land remains unprotected and vulnerable to land grabs from more powerful entities like governments and corporations. There is growing evidence of the vital role played by full legal ownership of land by indigenous peoples and local communities in preserving cultural diversity and in combating poverty and hunger, political instability and climate change.

This report examines the role of European Union (EU) member States, both collectively and individually, in the current reported wave of foreign land investment in Africa that has led to the current use of the term ‘land grabbing’.It discusses whether this role is consistent with the EU’s commitment to advance agriculture in Africa in order to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals and member states’ obligations under international human rights law.

In the last ten years or so, the global interest in, and concerns about, the issue of how the world shall provide a growing population with sufficient food, bioenergy and wood raw material has attracted increasing attention. Will land and water resources be enough, how shall they be best managed to achieve increased production and productivity without causing far-reaching negative environmental and social side-effects, will climate change make solutions more difficult, will there be financial means and know-how available to address all challenges and opportunities?

2014 was a year in which many citizens around the world lost hope and trust in conventional leaders’ abilities to solve national and global challenges.