Across Southeast Asia, a dramatic reconfiguring of land rights, livelihoods and economies is underway, with profound and disturbing implications for the future.
This was the main take-away message from a conference on Land grabbing Southeast Asia: agrarian-environmental transformations , held at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand on 5-6 June 2015. It was one a series of international academic conferences on land grabbing: Global Land Grabbing I in 2011 (University of Sussex, UK), Global Land Grabbing II in 2012 (Cornell University, USA), BRICS and agrarian transformations in 2014 (University of Brasilia, Brazil), BRICS and the Agrarian South in 2015 (University of Western Cape, South Africa), organised by the Land Deal Politics Initiative and the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies.
The Chiang Mai conference was impressive in scale, with 240 participants from 62 universities and 59 non-university organisations, and 81 papers presented.
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