Background Introduction ...Legal and Regulatory Framework...Registration of Land Tenure...Customary or Informal Tenure Arrangements...Public Access to Accurate Land Information...Land Dispute Resolution Realities...Public Participation in Decision Making Process...Difficult Situation, Not Impossible...

A Report to Enhance Discussions about Customary Land Rights in Burma.....This purpose of this paper is to present a brief summary of the
issues and current
situations facing ethnic and indigenous communities around the
world that are
using a customary rights framework to manage their land and natural resources.
By outlining these experiences, ethnic groups in Burma will be
able to better understand their own context and
possibilities as they struggle to gain control over
their lands during this transitional time. While examining how

...with increasing frequency, land is taken from farmers, often with little or no compensation. Large swathes of farmland have already been made available to foreign-based companies in a process that appears to be accelerating. Government data show that the amount of land transferred to private companies increased by as much as 900 percent from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s and now totals roughly 5 percent of Myanmar’s agricultural land...

A site with a large number of links to resources, including the papers of the 2011 International Conference on Global Land Grabbing..."FAC has been exploring what needs to be done to get different forms of agriculture – food/cash crops, livestock/pastoralism, smallholdings/contract farming/large holdings – moving on a track of increasing productivity and competitiveness.

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Our Mission:

A global alliance of civil society and intergovernmental organisations working together to promote secure and equitable access to and control over land for poor women and men through advocacy, dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building...
Our Vision:

Secure and equitable access to and control over land reduces poverty and contributes to identity, dignity and inclusion.

This study emerged out of an identified need to document social
processes leading to land insecurity, and those leading to investment
and sustainable use of lands by rural populations. Focusing on the
Delta and Dry Zone, the main paddy producing regions of Myanmar,
this analysis unravels the powers at play in shaping rural households’
relationship to land. From British colonization to the 2012 reforms,
many issues have remained relatively unchanged with regards to
local dynamics of landlessness, exclusion processes, local power plays,

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatisation of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. Offering a critique of the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved.

The scale of attacks against land rights defenders is particularly preoccupying and should attract our utmost reaction and urgent mobilisation.
The toll they pay, together with their families and communities, is dramatic,
be it killings, forced disappearances, harassment or criminalisation. Caught
in the crossfire between poor land users fighting for the respect of their basic
human rights and powerful economic actors fighting for juicy profits, they
account as one of the most vulnerable categories of human rights defenders.

Table of Contents: Mangrove Deforestation, Shrimp Farming, and the Survival of the Coastal...
Land Confiscation in Burma: Whose land is it?...
Shwe Gas Pro ect and the Impact on Arakan State...

A Brief History of Rice Agriculture and Chemical Fertilizer Use in Arakan State

Analysis of the social costs of large-scale Chinese-supported rubber farms in northern Burma suggests that the future for ordinary citizens will be affected as much by the country's chosen economic path as the political reforms underway.

Table of Contents: Mangrove Deforestation, Shrimp Farming, and the Survival of the Coastal... Land Confiscation in Burma: Whose land is it?... Shwe Gas Pro ect and the Impact on Arakan State... A Brief History of Rice Agriculture and Chemical Fertilizer Use in Arakan State