Across South Asia, many rural people use common land to harvest naturally-growing plants, grow crops and feed their livestock. Increasingly this activity is being commercialized as farmers move to sell the produce they obtain.

Across the developing world the way in which land is controlled and managed has been steadily changing. In the past fifty years, community ownership has increasingly given way to privatization.

Poverty, property rights and distributional implications of community-based resource management have become major topics of discussion and debate in recent years.