Production of commodities for global markets is an increasingly important factor of tropical deforestation, taking over smallholders subsistence farming. Measures to reduce deforestation and convert shifting cultivation systems towards permanent crops have recently been strengthened in several countries. But these changes have variable environmental and social impacts, including on ethnic minorities. In Vietnam, although a forest transition - i.e.

Cambodia is currently experiencing profound processes of rural change, driven by an emerging trend of large-scale land deals. This article discusses potential future pathways by analyzing two contrasting visions and realities of land use: the aim of the governmental elites to foster surplus-producing rural areas for overall economic growth, employment creation and ultimately poverty reduction, and the attempts of smallholders to maintain and create livelihoods based on largely self-sufficient rural systems.

Since the early 1960s, notwithstanding dire predictions of agricultural theorists and colonial observers, agricultural growth has been strong among most Southeast Asian countries. More recently, this expansion has reached the maritime domain, with the rapid development of aquatic production through sea-based aquaculture among others. In recent territorial expansion and increase in yields for export crops has been faster than for food crops.

The Cambodian case examines migration, land tenure and land management, in a context of conflict and the use of force in land transfers since the time of the Khmer Rouge regime to the present, by studying five agro-ecological zones close to the Kamping Pouy irrigation system in Battambang Province. The study combines analysis of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of household use of land and labor with a historical and ethnographic review of conflict and institutional factors in successive land administrations.

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production.

This participatory poverty assessment (PPA 2006) comprises one component of ADB’s Technical Assistance to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for Institutional Strengthening for Poverty Monitoring and Evaluation. The goal of this PPA, as with the first PPA in 2000, is to complement the statistical analyses of poverty in a meaningful way and to record the experiences and concerns of the poor in order to initiate and identify more effective forms of public and private actions to alleviate poverty.

The emergence of social and environmental movements against plantation forestry in Southeast Asia positions rural development against local displacement and environmental degradation. Multi-scaled NGO networks have been active in promoting the notion that rural people in Southeast Asia uniformly oppose plantation development. There are potential pitfalls in this heightened attention to resistance however, as it has often lapsed into essentialist notions of timeless indigenous agricultural practices, and unproblematic local allegiances to common property and conservation.

Over the last decade, following the doi moi reforms, the Vietnamese government has formally recognised the household as the basic unit of production and allocated land use rights to households. Under the 1993 Land Law these rights can be transferred, exchanged, leased, inherited, and mortgaged. A land market is emerging in Vietnam but is still constrained for various reasons. Additionally, lack of flexibility of land use is an issue.

The central objective of this working paper produced by Jean-Christophe Diepart and Thol Sem, is to examine the recognition and formalisation of peasants’ land rights against the backdrop of Cambodian history and political economy of land and agrarian change.

It aims to understand how colonialism, war, socialism and the regional integration against a neoliberal background have shaped the land rights of smallholder farmers in contemporary Cambodia.

Mainland Southeast Asia (MSA) has seen sweeping upland land use changes in the past decades, with transition from primarily subsistence shifting cultivation to annual commodity cropping. This transition holds implications for local upland communities and ecosystems. Due to its particular political regime, Myanmar is at the tail of this development.

Shortly after the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945, the organization had started to support member countries addressing structural problems in agriculture with land fragmentation and small holding and farm sizes through the development of land consolidation instruments (Binns, 1950). During the 1950s and 1960s, FAO provided technical assistance to the development of land consolidation in member countries in Europe such as Turkey, Greece, Spain and Cyprus, but also in the Near East and Asia (Meliczek, 1973).

In Sierra Leone, the well-being and livelihoods of many people, particularly the rural poor, are based on secure and equitable access to land, fisheries and forests. Increasing pressure on these resources in recent years has led to an escalation of conflict over access to natural resources.