In this new article - 'The spectacular commodity and land rush in Myanmar: its extent and consequences' – published in Globalizations, Sai Sam Kham documents how an estimated 3.5 million acres of land were captured by large corporations and elite actors from the 1990s to 2010s.
Based at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Sai Sam Kham argues that this led to the dispossession of many Myanmar villagers. As their land was often unregistered and untitled, state laws deemed these lands 'waste lands' which could be reallocated for to corporations for productive purposes.
He shows that despite the reallocation of these lands for agribusiness, mining and other commercial purposes, not all of the lands formally allocated to corporations were made productive and were abandoned by the contract holders after harvesting the timber from the land concession. Indeed, by the mid-2010s, only about a quarter of all allocated lands were made productive.
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