ABSTRACT

Secure land access is vital for Myanmar’s upland households, who rely on crops and forests to meet their subsistence needs. But recent land reforms threaten to undermine customary tenure and land-use practices in Myanmar. This paper combines income accounting methods with access theory to assess how new legislation may affect four Chin communities in the country’s north-west. Our assessment of 94 households’ land-access mechanisms and economic benefits from different types of land reveals existing land-access inequalities among Chin households and demonstrates communities’ continued dependence on environmental resources, especially those from swidden fields, home gardens and forests. A majority of households would lose all of their land-derived income, if they were denied access to communities’ customarily governed land, e.g., under the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Land Management Law. Policy stakeholders should therefore intervene, to alleviate land-access inequalities among Chin households and to direct Myanmar’s land-system dynamics onto more just development trajectories.

摘要

对于缅甸的旱地家庭来说，安全的土地使用至关重要，他们依靠农作物和森林来满足其生存需求。但是最近的土地改革有可能破坏缅甸的习惯权属和土地使用方式。本文将收入核算方法与获取理论相结合，以评估新立法如何影响该国西北部的四个钦族社区。我们对94户家庭的土地获取机制和不同类型土地带来的经济收益的评估揭示了下巴家庭现有的土地获取不平等现象，并表明了社区对环境资源的持续依赖，特别是来自耕地，家庭花园和森林的资源。如果他们被剥夺了社区习惯管理的土地的权利，例如在空置土地下，大多数家庭将失去他们所有的土地收入。休闲和维尔京土地管理法。因此，政策利益相关者应进行干预，以减轻钦族家庭之间的土地使用不平等，并将缅甸的土地系统动态引导到更公正的发展轨迹上。