This paper deepens the economic analysis of the effects of land consolidation – reduction of land fragmentation. It does this in the context of rural Vietnam, studying whether land consolidation promotes or hinders the Vietnamese government's policy objectives of encouraging agricultural mechanization and stimulating the off-farm rural economy. The analysis views land consolidation as a form of technical change, making it possible to apply the rich insights developed in the economic literature on that subject.

We estimate whether a land reform program led to higher incomes for ethnic minority households. In 2002, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Program 132 directed the transfer of farm land to ethnic minority households that had less than one hectare of land. Using the 2002 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey as a baseline, in 2008 we resurveyed over one-thousand households to provide a retrospective evaluation of the impact of their participation in Program 132.

Agricultural large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) is a process that is currently not captured by land change models. We present a novel land change modeling approach that includes processes governing LSLAs and simulates their interactions with other land systems. LSLAs differ from other land change processes in two ways: (1) their changes affect hundreds to thousands of contiguous hectares at a time, far surpassing other land change processes, e.g., smallholder agriculture, and (2) as policy makers value LSLA as desirable or undesirable, their agency significantly affects LSLA occurrence.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: This report explores the relationships between land tenure security and food security in Laos, with comparison to other developing countries. The purpose of the study is to better understand these linkages in order to recommend pathways for policies and projects to improve food insecurity by increasing rural poor people's access and tenure security to land.

Farm incomes in rural Vietnam are tightly constrained by very small farm sizes. Stringent limits on the area of cropland that individuals may own means that farmers need a well‐functioning rental market to consolidate land parcels, grow their farm enterprises, adopt new technology and increase incomes. This research investigates the efficiency and equity impacts of the rental market in rural Vietnam and attempts to identify transaction costs impeding the market.

This paper uses panel data at commune, household, and plot levels to study the causes and effects of agricultural land fragmentation in rural Viet Nam. We focus on both inter-farm fragmentation (the division of land into many small farms) and intra-farm fragmentation (the division of each farm into many small plots). In both these dimensions, land holdings in Viet Nam are highly fragmented. Results show strong effects of both inter- and intra-farm fragmentation on labour input per hectare in agriculture.

Land redistribution and agricultural collective production were the key components of agrarian reforms implemented by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the south of the country after 1975. Land inequality was serious in the region under the Republic of Vietnam's regime. The new government struggled with agricultural collectivisation contributing to the decline in rice productivity. This study explains the persistence of a market-based agricultural production in the southern economy under the new political regime.

Sudden and gradual land use changes can result in different socio-ecological systems, sometimes referred to as regime shifts. The Lao PDR (Laos) has been reported to show early signs of such regime shifts in land systems with potentially major socio-ecological implications. However, given the complex mosaic of different land systems, including shifting cultivation, such changes are not easily assessed using traditional land cover data. Moreover, regime shifts in land systems are difficult to simulate with traditional land cover modelling approaches.

ABSTRACTED FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In October 2014 the Myanmar government unveiled a draft National Land Use Policy (NLUP) and announced it would take public comments for a limited time before finalizing the document. Once it is finalized, the new policy will determine the distribution, use and management of the country’s land and related natural resources like forests and rivers, for years to come.

The rubber tree is native to the humid tropics and has traditionally been cropped in the equatorial zone between 108Nand 108S; in mainland Southeast Asia this includes portions of southern Thailand, southeastern Vietnam, and southern Myanmar. In the early 1950s, the Chinese government began to invest in growing rubber in environments perceived to be ecologically marginal and eventually established state rubber plantations in areas that lie as far north as 228 north latitude.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: This paper traces the implications of key agrarian transformations −particularly the reforms in land policy and emerging land relations− for livelihood security and vulnerability. Part of a broader societal transformation and globalization of economies, these new development trajectories include commercialization of farmers’ produce, contract farming, cooperative sector reform, rising landlessness and tenant farming, and the end of exclusive dependence on land for earning a living.

The process of decollectivization in Vietnam, leading up to the 1993 Land Law, ensured farming households the rights to market their own produce and to transfer, exchange, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. These changes imply a reworking of relations between state, market, and household, but also within households. Although the allocation of agricultural land in northern Vietnam was relatively equitable, allocation by the state represents only one channel of entitlements to land.