The project validated and disseminated a large number of improved rice-based cropping systems technologies suited to upland agro-ecologies. These improved technologies have good potentials to raise the productivity of water, land, and labor. The innovative strategies employed by the project including the paradigm of landscape management, multi-institutional partnership, multidisciplinary teamwork, farmer participatory approach to technology validation, and community-based seed production led to successful generation and dissemination of technologies.

With past and continued destruction of primary forest worldwide, secondary forest constitute a large and growing component of forest cover and have been found to be very important for a wide range of goods and services. Despite its widespread usage, there is considerable ambiguity with regard to the meaning of the term 'secondary forest' and the different forest types it encompasses.

Swidden farming is the main agent of conversion of primary forests to secondary forests in the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia, but there is a deterioration and decline of the practice with land use intensification. The population growth in northern Thailand has forced lowland farmers practising permanent wet rice cultivation to turn to short rotation swidden in the foot hill zone. Highland swidden agriculturists are adopting more intensive forms of swidden or are shifting to permanent farming.

Much of mainland Southeast Asia's primary forest has been converted into secondary vegetation types in the past several decades. In the Lower Mekong Subregion, nearly 100 million ha of forest were significantly altered or removed, with depletion in terms of areal percent most severe in Thailand and Vietnam. Timber extraction and conversion of forestland to agriculture are the two principal causes of forest degradation in the region. Logged sites are often later occupied by migrant homesteaders. The current regional focus of logging has shifted to Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.