An amendment to Myanmar’s land-ownership laws will make it nearly impossible for Rohingya refugees and Myanmar’s internally displaced to return to land they’ve tilled for generations, Peter Yeung reports.
HUSSEIN AHMED WAS once the respected chief of Inn Din, a village in the northern part of Myanmar’s Rakhine state. But since the end of 2017, the 74-year-old Rohingya has been a refugee in Bangladesh’s sprawling Kutupalong refugee camp.
Under a land reformation act, millions of farmers across Myanmar could be forced from land they have tilled for generations. Many are unaware of the danger they face. Peter Yeung and Carlotta Dotto report from Yangon.
It took less than a day for Daw Oo Naing's entire banana plantation to be destroyed. A group of 21 men carrying long knives arrived quietly in the morning and made quick work of hacking down her 600 trees, which were still young with tender trunks.
Sarawak: The Sarawak government’s strategy for economic growth through commercial development of agricultural land has resulted in vast areas of land being opened for large-scale plantations, including oil palm. In some places this has affected lands subject to ‘native customary land rights’.
Sarawak in Borneo is now one of last frontier areas for palm oil expansion left in Malaysia. With most available lands in the Peninsula already planted and most of Sabah already leased out, in Sarawak such expansion is accelerating.
