ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Myanmar’s agricultural sector has for long suffered due to multiplicity of laws and regulations, deficient and degraded infrastructure, poor policies and planning, a chronic lack of credit, and an absence of tenure security for cultivators. These woes negate Myanmar’s bountiful natural endowments and immense agricultural potential, pushing its rural populace towards dire poverty. This review hopes to contribute to the ongoing debate on land issues in Myanmar.

PUBLISHER'S ABSTRACT: The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 13 September 2007. Since then, the importance of the role that indigenous peoples play in economic, social and environmental conservation through traditional sustainable agricultural practices has been gradually recognized.

Political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground- breaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats.

The draft National Land Use Policy (NLUP) that was unveiled for public comment in October 2014 intends to create a clear national framework for managing land in Myanmar. This is a very important step for Myanmar, given the fundamental importance of land policy for any society – particularly those with recent and complex histories of political and armed conflict and protracted displaced populations. With 70% of Myanmar’s population living and working in rural areas, agriculture is a fundamental part of the country’s social and economic fabric.

WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This paper aims to provide keys that will help us understand contemporary land dynamics in these four countries. In order to do so it highlights their similarities and differences, both in the long history that shaped today’s local land situations and in more recent reforms implemented in the context of greater economic openness. The first part of the paper sets the cultural and historical context, with an overview of the diverse ways that the political authorities and different groups within the region have related to land.

In rural Cambodia indiscriminate, illegitimate and often violent land grabs in the form of Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) have triggered myriad local responses by peasants facing evictions from private and communal lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Kratie and Koh Kong provinces, this chapter looks at the various forms of local resistance to government-sanctioned dispossession and displacement and discusses their effectiveness in bringing about socio-political and institutional change.

The granting of economic land concessions (ELCs) over large parts of Cambodia has begun to attract global attention. It has also become a key focal point for civil society mobilization in Cambodia as well as for transnational activism directed at targets both within and outside Cambodia.

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world’s rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession.

Over the past 10 years, transnational land grabs for rubber tree plantations have proliferated across Laos. Plantation concessions are being established on village lands that are represented as ‘degraded’ and legally classified as ‘state forests’, expropriated by government officials in the name of poverty alleviation with promises that plantations will provide new wage labour opportunities for those dispossessed.

The document is a short version of the 70th anniversary exhibition at FAO in October 2015

يعرض هذا الكتاب العقود السبعة من تاريخ منظمة الأغذية والزراعة، روادها الأوائل ومساعيهم. فقد غصنها في أرشيف المنظمة لنخرج إلى النور صورا نادرة بالأبيض والأسود لم تنشر فيما سبق، والتي تمثل محفظة للسنوات الأولى من تاريخ المنظمة. ويعتبر هذا الكتاب أيضا سجلا للإنجازات العشرة الكبرى في تاريخ المنظمة والتي نذكر منها القضاء على الطاعون البقري؛ المعاهدة الدولية بشأن الموارد النباتية الوراثية التي تحظى بأهمية كبيرة في ضمان التنوع الحيوي على كوكب الأرض، ومدونة السلوك الرشيد لأنشطة إنتاج الأحياء البحرية الهامة والضرورية للحفاظ على النظام البيئي البحري.