Villagers in northern Pa'an District of central Karen State say their livelihoods are under serious threat due to exploitation by SPDC military authorities and by their Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) allies who rule as an SPDC proxy army in much of the region. Villages in the vicinity of the DKBA headquarters are forced to give much of their time and resources to support the headquarters complex, while villages directly under SPDC control face rape, arbitrary detention and threats to keep them compliant with SPDC demands. The SPDC plans to expand Dta Greh (a.k.a.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) hailed the recent Hong Kong Sixth Ministerial Meeting last December 2005 as a positive movement towards the conclusion of the Doha Development Round. The round was supposedly geared towards ensuring that trade contributes to the development objectives of least developed and developing countries.

Contents: 

• The Seikatsu Club Consumers Cooperative: A Unique Producer-Consumer Relationship in Japan
• PDAP’s Push for Organic Rice: Enhancing the Survival of Filipino Rice Farmers in a Liberalized Economic
• Setting Green Net: A Trailblazer in Organic Marketing in Southeast Asia
• The Fair Trade System: Focus on the Oxfam-GB Model
• Emergency or Expediency?: A Study of Emergency Rice Reserve Schemes in Asia 

Pour faire face aux problèmes de faible consommation d’engrais chimiques dans le secteur agricole au Madagascar, le Gouvernement a mit en place une stratégie nationale pour le développement de l’utilisation de l’engrais (SNE) en 2006.

The Rural Land Use Policy for Fiji is a national policy with a multi-sectoral approach. The general principle of this Policy is to determine responsibilities of the State, landowners and land users in the fields of sustainable rural development, land management, protection of natural resources, having regard to biophysical, cultural, social and commercial factors.Technical, institutional and legal framework will be strengthened and assessment will be carried out on agricultural land, pastures and forests to ensure efficient land use.

It is against inappropriate decisions in the allocation of land use activities that are manifested, among others, in form of: land degradation, mainly soil erosion, loss of vegetation cover; loss of biological diversity, wetlands degradation, pollution, uncontrolled urban development, conflicts over land use, and reduced land productivity that government committed resources for the preparation of this National Land Use Policy.The policy aims to support the national objectives on poverty eradication and economic growth while at the same time ensuring sustainable utilisation of natural resour

La Nouvelle lettre de politique de développement agricole (NLPDA) vise à améliorer l’efficacité et l’efficience des exploitations familiales et des marchés, promouvoir l’entreprenariat agricole grâce à la stimulation de l’initiative privée et améliorer l’efficacité des exportations. Elle va s’appuyer sur les dynamiques d’investissement privé, de production et de recherche de productivité dans l’agriculture.

According to the annual report of Huaphan Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Office (PAFO) (1999), despite land allocation, some villages are still practising shifting cultivation. To address this problem many decrees and regulations on land and land use have been developed and declared. The land allocation (LA) programme is one of these initiatives. So far, no effort has been made to evaluate whether the LA programme could facilitate change in land use and land management. The major objective of this study was to assess the impact of the LA programme on land use and land management.

Aim This paper describes the development of novel indices of bird‐habitat preference to examine bird species’ use of habitats and their distributions relative to habitats. It assesses the implications for bird conservation regionally and the scope for biodiversity assessments generally. Location A 200 km by 400 km area of farmland with seminatural and urban areas, covering south‐eastern England. Methods Cluster analysis was used to link birds to landscapes. Cluster centroid coordinate values were processed to derive indices of bird‐habitat preference.