Commercial Agriculture Expansion in Myanmar: Links to Deforestation, Conversion Timber, and Land Conflicts

Commercial Agriculture Expansion in Myanmar: Links to Deforestation, Conversion Timber, and Land Conflicts

By Kevin Woods

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WASHINGTON, DC (12 March 2015) — An exclusive new analysis reveals that the Government of Myanmar has allocated at least 5.2 million acres and plans to allocate another 11 million acres of Southeast Asia’s last remaining biodiversity-rich high-value forests to make way for large-scale, private agribusiness projects that often never materialize.

Many of these forest areas overlap with historical land claims made by Myanmar’s ethnic minority groups who will now permanently lose their land, further enflaming decades-old armed conflicts with the national government. As local communities lose out, wildlife habitat is destroyed and carbon emissions increase, while elite businessmen with strong connections to former Military-state officials profit.

DOCUMENTS

FULL REPORT (English):

Commercial Agriculture Expansion in Myanmar: Links to Deforestation, Conversion Timber, and Land Conflicts

FULL REPORT (Burmese)

မန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္စီးပြားျဖစ္စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေရး တိုးခ်ဲ႕ျပဳလုပ္လာျခင္း: သစ္ေတာျပဳန္းတီးမႈ၊

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Commercial Agriculture Expansion in Myanmar: Links to Deforestation, Conversion Timber, and Land Conflicts
– Executive Summary

 

PRESS RELASES
Press Release: English ^[PDF]
Press Release: Burmese ^[PDF]

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS

Map showing overlapping palm oil concessions, national parks, and forest reserves in Tanintharyi Region