In the law & on the land: finding the female farmer in Myanmar’s National Land Use Policy

Abstract

This paper draws upon twelve months of activist research to examine Myanmar's female farmer on the land and in the law. For rural women, the female farmer was an anomaly with emancipatory implications, one associated with a particular material conditions, social relations, and attitudes. In contrast, the female farmer in the National Land Use Policy text was a rightsbearing legal subject produced by a set of negotiations in which individuals acting as experts 'rendered technical' (Li 2007) distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender. Examining the production of and relationship between these representations helps problematize Myanmar's contemporary political transition by providing an ethnographic entry point to chart shifting discourses and subjectivities.

Emerging ‘agrarian climate justice’ struggles in Myanmar

“…The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) were used by participants linked to LIOH to evaluate the draft NLUP put forward by the government, to assess objectives, identify weaknesses and include contributions, legitimizing grassroots perspectives with reference to international standards, or what could be called 'policymaking from below' (Franco and Ju 2016, 64). International human rights, or rights-based international regulatory instruments such as Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), have also been used as standards (Faxon 2017;Park 2019;TNI 2015b). In national contexts where the struggle for rights is still underway, human rights can be useful to demand political participation and recognition (Franco 2008).…”

“…Some of the limitations were that 'land to tiller' (giving land to those ready to work it), a 'land size ceiling' and a 'guaranteed minimum land access to villagers' were omitted in the NLUP (Borras and Franco 2018). Further, the NLUP policy-making process lacked sufficient use of ethnic languages, and were mostly in Burmese and English, while female farmers were mostly represented by elite women (Faxon 2017).…”

The “Gender Agenda” in Agriculture for Development and Its (Lack of) Alignment With Feminist Scholarship

“…As Ben-Eli (2018) argues, genuine sustainability includes maximizing the "freedom and potential self-realization of all humans without any individual or group adversely affecting others." There is growing awareness that sustainable agriculture requires addressing forms of power and privilege within agricultural production and supply chains to include more diverse human voices and address structural issues (e.g., Faxon, 2017;Slätmo et al, 2017;Jerneck, 2018;Winter et al, 2020). In particular, gendered forms of social organization are deeply embedded across a variety of scales within food systems, at the household and community level and extending through to international organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (e.g., Zuckerman, 2007;Kangmennaang et al, 2017).…”

Access mapping highlights risks from land reform in upland Myanmar

“…Academic and donor-led research on policy changes and land conflicts in Myanmar flourishes in this context (Faxon, 2017;Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations & Mekong Region Land Governance, 2019;Mark, 2016;Mark & Belton, 2020;Thein, n.d.;Woods, 2019). Rural communities' customary tenure systems and how they conflict with statutory law have thus been relatively well documented (Andersen, 2016b;Aung & Pretzsch, 2017;Boutry et al, 2018;University of Forestry and Environmental Science Yezin, 2018;Von der Mühlen, 2018).…”