Between Vietnam's independence and its reunification in 1975, the country's socialist land tenure system was underpinned by the principle of "land to the tiller". During this period, government redistributed land to farmers that was previously owned by landlords. The government's "egalitarian" approach to land access was central to the mass support that it needed during the Indochinese war.

There has been a trend to encourage organic agriculture in response to improve global food security. This article investigated how organic agriculture contributed to food security of small land holders experiencing organic agriculture. It involved in-depth interview, focus group, and participatory observation from a purposive sample of thirty participants at San Sai and Muang Wa Villages, Luang Neua Sub-District, Doi Sa Ket District, Chiang Mai Province, the north of Thailand.

This paper investigates how climate change strategies and resource conflicts are shaping each other in the Greater Aural region of western Cambodia. Agro-industrial projects linked to climate change goals are reshaping both social and ecological dynamics, by altering patterns of access to land and water resources as well as the nature of the resources themselves. Using a landscape perspective, we investigate these social and ecological changes occurring across space and time.

This study investigated the implications of large-scale land concessions in the Red River Delta, Vietnam, and Northeast Cambodia with regard to urban and agricultural frontiers, agrarian transitions, migration, and places from which the migrant workers originated.

Increasing global demand for natural rubber began in the mid-2000s and led to large-scale expansion of plantations in Laos until rubber latex prices declined greatly beginning in 2011. The expansion of rubber did not, however, occur uniformly across the country. While the north and central Laos experienced mostly local and smallholder plantations, rubber expansion in the south was dominated by transnational companies from Vietnam, China and Thailand through large-scale land concessions, often causing conflicts with local communities.

Land cover data is widely used for the design and monitoring of land use policies despite the incapability of this type of data to represent multiple land uses and land management activities within the same landscape. In this study, we operationalized the concept of land systems for the case of the Lao PDR (Laos). Distinct land systems like shifting cultivation and plantations (land concessions) cannot be fully captured by land cover inventories alone, in spite of their relevance for land use policies.

Growing numbers of policies and programmes aim to integrate small-scale rural producers into agricultural value chains. But significant questions remain over how best to: recognise the possibly divergent visions, interests and constraints of various actors; address often substantial power imbalances; and ultimately promote agency among rural producers and their communities – that is, their ability to choose, act and influence realities around them.

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.

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.

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.

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.