ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: This report provides a strategic assessment of the key issues, opportunities, constraints and choices facing Myanmar’s agricultural sector. Discussion focuses on pathways that will permit agriculture to contribute meaningfully to broad-based improvements in purchasing power and food security for the country’s many landless and vulnerable households. In doing so, it aims to assist public and private stakeholders who will be making the key investment and policy decisions governing future agricultural and food security trajectories in Myanmar.

This article discusses two important concepts of food security and food sovereignty in the context of Vietnam’s post-reform economy. It examines Vietnam’s persistent choice of the food security framework, its resulting policies and their implications. The article argues that the choice of food security framework has served to justify the promotion of industrial agriculture and international trade. While this model has led to increased food productivity, it failed to guarantee access to and quality of food, the other two important pillars of the food security framework.

Over the past decade the Myanmar government has increasingly promoted industrial agricultural production in the country, especially for rubber. With the lead up to the national elections, and now after political-economic reforms begin to set in, foreign investors are eager to make Myanmar into the next rubber production frontier. This report outlines the emerging political ecology of rubber production in Myanmar, with particular attention to the political economy and geography of rubber development taking root during Myanmar’s reform period.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The key findings of this field visit identified two main types of agricultural investments in northern Laos. One is the government-initiated agricultural cooperation program, in par-ticular the Alternative Development Scheme aka Opium Substation Development Scheme supported by Chinese government. The other is individual small-scale contract farming investments by Chinese businessmen. Current and potential issues related to these agricultural investments were also examined, including border passings and cus-tom clearance procedures.

The agricultural Sector in Cambodia still contributes the dominant quantity to the GDP. It is the most important source of income and rural livelihood for around 80% of the Cambodian population. Cambodia’s rural population faces new challenges like high population growth, embracing market economy and international private investment, nationwide food security and decreasing agricultural production conditions as a result of rapidly changing socio-economic conditions since 1990.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This paper focuses on the role of the rice sector in Cambodian agriculture strategy. The paper first reviews the performance of the rice sector in Cambodian agriculture and rice-related government policies and interventions, and it then identifies potential and constraints for future development of the rice sector.

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.

In recent years the Lao government has provided many foreign investors with large-scale economic land concessions to develop plantations. These concessions have resulted in significant alterations of landscapes and ecological processes, greatly reduced local access to resources through enclosing common areas, and ultimately leading to massive changes in the livelihoods of large numbers of mainly indigenous peoples living near these concessions.

This paper attempts to define the factors which determine emigration and rice doublecropping, i.e. rice cultivation on the same plot twice per year, by rural households in Cambodia, and investigates whether these decisions influence each other using data from a two-period panel survey of 231 households in three provinces in rural Cambodia. In the analysis, we take into account possible correlation between these decisions (through estimating a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model) and unobserved heterogeneity among farmers (through estimating a random-effects probit model).

The current study attempts to examine whether large-scale agricultural investment of this type benefits the poor and how this investment can be implemented to increase benefits for the poor. It is arguable whether the poor need more land to grow crops to meet their food security requirements or need to benefit from large-scale agricultural investment in Cambodia. Although the poor households are capable of operating small plots of a few hectares each, they generally lack capital and the means to work large chunks of new land with forests or degrade forests.

FIRST PARAGRAPH OF OVERVIEW: This paper is part of a study “Policy Analysis for the Development of Land Policy for Socio- Economic Development.” Land policy relates to the institutional arrangements through which the Government of Vietnam defines which individuals and groups have access to rights in land and the circumstances that apply to gaining and retaining that access.

INTRODUCTION: Over the last 30 years, the context of development in Cambodian has undergone dramatic changes. A succession of deep transformations, characterized by a complete restructuring of institutional and socio-economic environment, has resulted in a singular situation. Cambodian society remains largely agrarian, with land being the corner stone of the production system for a large majority of the population.