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There has been a wave of land grabbing on an unprecedented scale in Myanmar since government reforms starting in 2011. The reforms include several new laws on land and investment that change the legal basis for land use rights, especially in the uplands, while establishing a legal land market in order to encourage domestic and foreign investment in land. There are serious concerns that these changes will further exacerbate land tenure and food insecurity for the majority of the population in Burma who rely on their farm fields and forests for their livelihoods.
The 2012 land laws do not take into account the existing land tenure situation in ethnic areas where shifting cultivation in the uplands is common and where few have formally-recognized land titles, not to mention national identity cards. Indeed, the new laws do not recognize customary and communal land rights at all. Nor do they consider the right of return of hundreds of thousands of ethnic villagers who have been displaced from their ancestral lands due to the decades-old conflict and economic marginalisation. Consequently, the new laws are seen as exclusively benefitting the private sector, particularly large foreign investors, at the expense of smallholder farmers, who make up three-quarters of the population.
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