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Agrarian Transitions, forests and the resource periphery in the Mekong Region
Conference presentation

Agrarian Transitions, forests and the resource periphery in the Mekong Region

Robert J Fisher and Philip Hirsch
Critical Transitions in the Mekong Region, 2007 (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 29-Jan-2007–31-Jan-2007)
Chiang Mai University
2007
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Abstract

Forestry Sciences
As transitions in agrarian systems have increasingly extended from core agricultural areas to incorporate resource peripheries in the Mekong region, agrarian change has become bound up with environmental concerns. At a material level, agrarian processes have - or at least are claimed to have - significant environmental impacts including forest conversion, intensified demand for water, floods and droughts based on altered hydrological conditions in catchments and soil erosion and depletion. At a discursive level, such claims and some counterclaims have led to an intertwining of agrarian issues with environmental debates, requiring an understanding of agrarian change within the wider environmentalism manifest in Thailand and, increasingly, other Mekong countries. Many of these environmental changes and debates are directly relevant to forests. In the context of these rapid changes to agriculture and the context within which it operates, significant numbers of people (mostly belonging to minority ethnic groups) remain severely marginalised and often impoverished, with limited access to agricultural land and with their rights to use forest resources at best severely restricted. Poverty itself is often represented as being related to forest access. The promotion of community forestry has been largely based on the belief that secure rights to forests would enhance livelihoods and contribute to poverty reduction amongst forest dependent people.

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