The MRLG Project Hosts the 4th Mekong Regional Land Forum, celebrating 11 years of the Project

Hosted by the Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) project – implemented by Land Equity International and GRET – the Forum marked both a culmination of ten years of collaboration and an invitation to chart new trajectories for land, climate, and community resilience across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

TLI focuses on three interrelated pathways: investors, the national business ecosystem and the global and regional development community, employing a multi-tiered approach to change investor practices and enabling environments at all levels. The Project utilises a variety of tools and methods to do this including the development of tech tools like the Risk-Reward Model and regular cross-sectoral events, as Dr. Boupha references below. The end product of this is to promote and incentivise transformation and alignment with TLI practices.

With almost five years since the adoption of the ASEAN Guidelines, Renée Chartres recently travelled to Cambodia to examine their impact on the rubber sector.. She travelled with Asisah Man from Oxfam Cambodia to support Oxfam’s work under the Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) regional Responsible Agriculture Investment (RAI) activities focused on gender equality and RAI.. Below are her reflections on this experience.

The Mekong Region Land Governance Project aims to improve land governance in four of the Mekong countries, by empowering local reform actors, building alliances, and supporting policy influencing activities. The Project takes a regional approach across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam to support cross country learning and to facilitate and open up space for dialogue and alliance building. The Project has been designed to deliver the following key objective: Smallholder women and men farmers in CLMV countries, especially those belonging to ethnic minorities, have secure and equitable access to and control over agricultural land, forest and fisheries.

The Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) project, together with our partners at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Land Portal, will organise the 3rd Mekong Regional Land Forum (MRLF2021) in the coming weeks, entitled “Land tenure in Mekong forest landscapes: advancing the recognition of customary rights and responsible investment practices”.  This forum will bring together reform-minded actors within and beyond the region to engage in in-depth, interactive debate on issues that cut to the core of the most pressing challenges facing tenure security in forest areas and the impacts of  agribusiness investment.

Thanks, Kate, and nice to talk with you. All things being equal, the transition has been really smooth. As you know, I came into the Mekong Region Land Governance Project (MRLG) amid the Covid-19 pandemic, when things in Vientiane were just beginning to reopen. The borders remain effectively closed so this makes for a difficult situation trying to run a regional project. But I have an amazing team—some of the best people I have worked with.

International deforestation statistics are compelling. Annual tree cover loss is regularly reported at the size of entire countries and this is rapidly increasing. We know that addressing deforestation is essential to climate mitigation – yet forests receive just 3% of available climate mitigation finance. This is despite recognised additional deforestation risks of biodiversity loss and disease spread (including COVID-19).

The Bokeo Province in Lao PDR’s North-West, is predominantly populated by ethnic groups such as the Hmong, Khmu, Akha and Lahu. Despite having occupied the forest areas for generations, many communities face challenges of ownership to their ancestral lands today. The remote, mountainous location often leaves them disconnected from a modernizing world and the rural communities typically have a high rate of poverty. A lack of options for local, sustainable livelihoods lead the youth to migrate to urban environments for education and work.