Rethinking the role of agriculture as a driver of social and economic transformation in Southeast Asia’s upland regions: The view from Chin State, Myanmar

Mark Vicol, Bill Pritchard and Yu Yu Htay

Land Use Policy, 2018, vol. 72, issue C, 451-460

Abstract: Mainstream analysis of contemporary livelihood transformations and rural development in the upland regions of Southeast Asia has hitherto focused primarily on the role of agricultural commercialization and cash crops. This is reflected in policy narratives that conflate the fortunes of rural households to the expansion of a particular kind of entrepreneurial agriculture. In this article, we problematize the dynamics of economic and social change in the little-studied uplands of Chin State, Myanmar, against this policy backdrop. Using the insights from original field research, we argue that in Chin it is misplaced to explain processes of upland rural change via a cash crops narrative that over-emphasizes the potential of commercial agriculture in household livelihoods in this region. Instead, the dynamics of rural development in Chin consist of a more diverse set of interconnections, reflecting the manifold ways in which Chin households are differentially inserted into local, regional and global social and economic processes. We illustrate this via an examination of the patchy emergence of a cash crop, elephant foot yam, vis-à-vis non-local livelihood formation and the organization of livelihood pathways around the maintenance of social and cultural practices, including swidden production.

Keywords: Rural livelihoods; Agrarian transition; Land; Uplands; Boom crops; Agricultural development; Swidden; Myanmar; Southeast Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837717312188
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:72:y:2018:i:c:p:451-460

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.01.009

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().