Agricultural Land In Myanmar’S Dry Zone

Myanmar has high levels of landlessness and an uneven distribution of land among landed households, despite an abundance of land per head of population relative to other countries in the region. Land is a central issue in the post-2016 policy landscape, and efforts to provide restitution for widespread land confiscations that occurred during the period of military rule forms a major pillar of the current government’s governance agenda. In this research highlight, we present analysis of agricultural land use, distribution, access, tenure, land markets, and historical patterns of ownership and disposal. Findings are derived from a representative survey of 1578 rural households in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone - the Rural Economy and Agriculture Dry Zone Survey (READZ). The READZ survey was conducted from April to May 2017 in four townships (Magway, Pwinbyu, Myittha, and Budalin) in Magway, Mandalay and Sagaing regions. The main two farmland categories present in the areas surveyed are lowland (paddy land; le), and ‘upland’ (ya). Lowland can be subdivided into rain-fed and irrigated lowland, and is utilized primarily for paddy cultivation. Mainly non-paddy crops are cultivated on upland, which is primarily rainfed. Upland is dominant in terms of area, but generally less fertile than lowland. Where appropriate, we disaggregate our analysis by agricultural landholding terciles. In order to derive terciles, farm households were ranked by size in ascending order and divided into three equal groups. Thus, landholding tercile 1 is the third of farms with the smallest agricultural holdings, tercile 3 the third with the largest holdings, and tercile 2 is intermediate.