...[O]n 19th June, 2012, the President of the Union guided on the following land reform matters to draw and implement the national development long term and short term plans: (a) To manage, calculate, use and carry out systematically the Sustainable Development of natural resources such as land, water, forest, mines to enable to use them future generations; (b)To manage and carry out systematically the land use policy and land use management not to cause land problems such as land use, land fluctuation and land trespass; (c) To disburse, coordinate and carry out with the Union Government, t

This website contains mainly news reports about the global rush to buy up or lease farmlands abroad as a strategy to secure basic food supplies or simply for profit. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring or researching the issue, particularly social activists, non-government organisations and journalists.

The new National Land Use Policy is a positive step, but its principles need to be enshrined in law to protect the vulnerable from land grabs and forced evictions...

Disputes over land ownership and use are a major source of social and economic tension in Myanmar as it grapples with political transition and economic development.

Irresponsible investment against the interests and wishes of communities which results in the widespread violation of land-related human rights has been allowed for too long.

Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, see investment in foreign farmland as an important new source of revenue. As a result, fertile agricultural land is becoming increasingly privatised and concentrated.

A global coalition of 14 Partners and over 120 international, regional and community organizations advancing forest tenure, policy, and market reforms.....

Core Beliefs:

"Based on our experience, we find that empowerment of rural people and asset-based development are part of a process that is dependent on a set of enabling conditions, including security of tenure to access and use natural resources. As a coalition of diverse and varied organizations, RRI is guided by a set of core beliefs...

Rights of Poor Communities Must Be Recognized and Strengthened:

GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. Our support takes the form of independent research and analysis, networking at local, regional and international levels, and fostering new forms of cooperation and alliance-building. Most of our work is oriented towards, and carried out in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This report examines the situation faced by Karen villagers in Thaton District (known as Doo Tha Htoo in Karen). The district lies in what is officially the northern part of Mon State and also encompasses part of Karen State to the west of the Salween River . Successive Burmese regimes have had strong control over the parts of the district to the west of the Rangoon-Martaban road for many years. They were also able to gain 'defacto' control over the eastern part of the district following the fall of the former Karen National Union (KNU) stronghold at Manerplaw in 1995.

What rural dwellers in the Global South experience as land grabbing, tends to be seen in the Global North as ‘agricultural investment’. The World Bank has been at the forefront of a drive to legitimate these investments, convening to win support for a code of conduct based on Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles. Many key civil society groups reject the proposal for a code of conduct, objecting to the top-down process by which it was formulated and arguing that it was more likely to legitimate than prevent land grabbing.

Land is often the most significant asset of most rural families.
70% of Myanmar’s
population lives in rural areas and 70% of the population is engaged in agriculture and
related activities.

The Farmland Law and the VFV Law were approved by Parliament on March 30th, 2012. There have
been a few improvements compared to previous laws such as recognition of
non-rotational taungya as
a legitimate land-use and recognition that farmers are using VFV lands without formal recognition by
the Government. However overall the Laws lack clarity and provide
weak protection of the rights of
smallholder farmers in upland areas and do not explicitly state the equal rights
of women to register

A network of land-focused civil society organisations has raised concerns that bylaws for two new pieces of land legislation fail to offer proper protection for upland farmers who use shifting cultivation, leaving millions at risk of losing their land tenure rights.

Land Core Group chairman U Shwe Thein said that the recently introduced bylaw for the Farmland Law interprets taungya, or upland farming, as only fields under permanent cultivation. This leaves farmers who practise upland shifting cultivation with little protection from losing their lands...

The new wave of political reforms have set Myanmar on a road to
unprecedented economic expansion, but,
without
targeted policy
efforts and
regulation to
even the playing field, the benefits of new
investment will filter down to only a few,
leaving
small
-
scale farmers
–
the backbone of the Myanmar economy
–
unable
to benefit from