SUMMARY: The Vietnamese government has made some progress towards tackling illegal logging and the associated trade. It has negotiated a voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) with the EU, a process that has prompted a review of relevant legislation and improved the government’s engagement with civil society. In addition, it has signed agreements with Lao PDR and Cambodia in which it has committed to coordination on forest management and trade. However, there has been little progress in policy reform, and there is still no legislation regulating illegal timber imports.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Burma has entered a pivotal stage in its political and economic development. The advent of a new quasi-civilian government has raised the prospect of fundamental reforms. This has sparked great investment interest among governments and the private sector in the region and beyond, to extract the country’s natural-resource wealth, and to develop large-scale infrastructure projects to establish strategic ‘corridors’ to connect Burma to the wider economic region.

Myanmar has recently positioned itself as the world’s newest frontier market, while simultaneously undergoing transition to a post-war, neoliberal state. The new Myanmar government has put the country’s land and resources up for sale with the quick passing of market-friendly laws turning land into a commodity. Meanwhile, the Myanmar government has been engaging in a highly contentious national peace process, in an attempt to end one of the world's longest running civil wars.

This eight-month investigation recorded tonnes of rare timber being trucked out of Cambodia’s national parks and shipped to Hong Kong. Logging of luxury-grade timber is outlawed in Cambodia, and the global trade in Siamese Rosewood has been restricted since 2013, but Chinese demand for antique-style Hongmu furniture is increasing and the illegal trade has ballooned since the ban was announced. During months of interviews with loggers, state officials, police and activists, our investigators kept coming back to one man, who we’ve dubbed the 'King of Rosewood'.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE INTRODUCTION: ...the book includes 10 chapters. The first chapter provides the overview of the conceptual approach of the program and a synthesis of key findings. The core of the book consist of eight chapters which have been grouped thematically in four sections: water management and agriculture; agricultural innovation and food security; land use change and food security strategies in communities of indigenous people; and environmental change in fishing communites.

Transition to market-oriented agriculture has been characterized in all the CIS countries by a massive shift from large-scale "agricultural enterprises" to small family farms. The comparative efficiency of these two categories of farms is thus a topical issue for agriculture in transition counties. This article uses national agricultural statistics for Moldova for 1990-2006 and cross-section data from three farm surveys conducted in 2000-2003 to analyze the productivity of small individual farms and large corporate farms in Moldova.

This paper uses data from a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) project being implemented in Nicaragua to examine the extent to which poorer households that are eligible to participate are in fact able to do so, an issue over which there has been considerable concern. The study site provides a strong test of the ability of poorer households to participate, as it requires participants to make substantial and complex land use changes.

This paper reviews the literature to identify the relationship between tenure security and food security. The literatures on tenure issues and food security issues are not well connected and the scientific evidence on the causal links between tenure security and food security is very limited. The paper explores the conceptual linkages between land tenure reforms, tenure security and food security and illustrates how these vary across diverse contexts.

In many countries, water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of service provision. Identification of factors driving piped and non-piped water demand is a necessary prerequisite for predicting how consumers will react to such price increases.

In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam experienced a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder. We study the issue empirically using four household surveys spanning 1993-2004. Although we find rising landlessness amongst the poor, the post-reform landlessness rate tends to be higher for the non-poor.

We present the results of a framed field experiment with Ethiopian farmers that use the mountain rain forest as a common pool resource. Harvesting honey causes damage to the forest, and open access leads to over-harvesting. We test different mechanisms for mitigating excessive harvesting: a collective tax with low and high tax rates, and a tax/subsidy system. We find that the high-tax scheme works best in inducing the desired level of harvesting, while the tax-subsidy scheme may trigger tacit collusion.

The dramatic transition from Communism to market economies across Asia and Europe started in the Chinese countryside in the 1970s. Since then more than a billion of people, many of them very poor, have been affected by radical reforms in agriculture. However, there are enormous differences in the reform strategies that countries have chosen. This paper presents a set of arguments to explain why countries have chosen different reform policies.