PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION: An exclusive new analysis reveals that the Government of Myanmar has allocated at least 5.2 million acres and plans to allocate another 11 million acres of Southeast Asia’s last remaining biodiversity-rich high-value forests to make way for large-scale, private agribusiness projects that often never materialize. Many of these forest areas overlap with historical land claims made by Myanmar’s ethnic minority groups who will now permanently lose their land, further enflaming decades-old armed conflicts with the national government.

This eight-month investigation recorded tonnes of rare timber being trucked out of Cambodia’s national parks and shipped to Hong Kong. Logging of luxury-grade timber is outlawed in Cambodia, and the global trade in Siamese Rosewood has been restricted since 2013, but Chinese demand for antique-style Hongmu furniture is increasing and the illegal trade has ballooned since the ban was announced. During months of interviews with loggers, state officials, police and activists, our investigators kept coming back to one man, who we’ve dubbed the 'King of Rosewood'.

Myanmar has recently positioned itself as the world’s newest frontier market, while simultaneously undergoing transition to a post-war, neoliberal state. The new Myanmar government has put the country’s land and resources up for sale with the quick passing of market-friendly laws turning land into a commodity. Meanwhile, the Myanmar government has been engaging in a highly contentious national peace process, in an attempt to end one of the world's longest running civil wars.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: ...the book includes 10 chapters. The first chapter provides the overview of the conceptual approach of the program and a synthesis of key findings. The core of the book consist of eight chapters which have been grouped thematically in four sections: water management and agriculture; agricultural innovation and food security; land use change and food security strategies in communities of indigenous people; and environmental change in fishing communites.

To date, REDD+ projects in Laos have made relatively conservative choices on driver engagement, focusing on smallholder-related drivers like shifting cultivation and small-scale agricultural expansion, to the exclusion of drivers like agro-industrial concessions, mining concessions and energy and transportation infrastructure. While these choices have been based on calculated decisions made in the context of project areas, they have created a pair of challenges that REDD+ practitioners must currently confront. The first is lost opportunity.