Burma’s Resource Curse: The Case for Revenue Transparency in the Oil and Gas Sector

Burma is rich in natural resources, particularly natural gas and oil. Yet instead of using these resources for the country’s development through industry and job growth, military leaders have been exporting them for over a decade […]

လယ္ယာေျမ အဓၶမသိမ္းယူမႈ မ်ားႏွင့္ေအာင္ပြဲအပိုင္းအစမ်ား

The Farmers’ Rights Defenders Network, a Burma-based rights group, has released a new publication documenting and recounting the courageous fight against land expropriation, intimidation and false prosecution of a group of rural villagers […]

ဤအစီရင္ခံစာသည္ မေကြးတိုင္းေဒသၾကီး၊ သရက္ခရိုင္၊ ကံမျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ စစၥရံေက်းရြာရွိ ရိုးသားစြာ လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္ေသာ လယ္သမားမ်ား မတရားမႈမ်ားကို မိမိတို႕၏ စုစည္းမႈအားျဖင့္ တြန္းလွန္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈကို ရွာေဖြတိုက္ပြဲဝင္ခဲ့ၾကသည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုအား […]

Stop Damming the Chindwin

The Burmese military government, together with the government of India, is planning to build a giant hydroelectric dam near Tamanthi on the Chindwin River in northwest Burma’s Sagaing Division. The dam’s flood reservoir will be almost 1,400 sq km, the size of Delhi, and will permanently […]

Grabbing Land: Destructive Development in Ta’ang Region

In accordance to the land confiscation documented in this report, the Burmese military regime has not only constantly violated the domestic laws in Burma like the Nationalization Act, the Land Acquisition Act and also Customary Law but also international law […]

Still Imprisoned: Opium Cultivation Soars in Palaung Areas Under Burma’s New Regime

Almost one year after Burma’s long-awaited elections were held in November 2010, Palaung communities in northern Shan State are suffering from the effects of an even greater upsurge in opium cultivation than in previous years. Local paramilitary leaders, some now elected into Burma’s new parliament […]

SOLD OUT: Launch of China Pipeline Project Unleashes Abuse Across Burma

Construction of various project components to extract, process, and export the Shwe gas – as well as oil trans shipments from Africa and the Middle East – is now well underway. Local peoples are losing their land and fishing grounds without finding new job opportunities […]

Occasional Paper 10B: Agrofuels – A boost of Energy for the Mekong Region?

This background paper seeks to brief readers on the extent of the development, production and consumption of agrofuels, particularly liquid fuels for transport, in the Mekong region. The area of focus comprises the countries of the Mekong River Basin, that is, flowing downstream north to south, the southernmost prefectures of China (Yunnan and Guangxi), Lao PDR, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam […]

Endangered Elephants in Megatha Forest, Karen State, Burma

Megatha Forest is a 156 sq km protected Wildlife Sanctuary in Karen State. The Karen Social and Environmental Action Network (KESAN) sent a study team to the forest. The team spent two years looking for elephants and talking to local people and forest officials about elephants and other biodiversity […]

Burma’s Environment: People, Problems, Policies

Burma is currently facing many threats to the natural environment and sustainable livelihoods, such as construction of large dams, oil and gas extraction, mining, deforestation, large-scale agricultural concessions, illegal wildlife trade and climate change […]

Save Mong Kok from Coal

The Italian-Thai Power Company has entered into agreements with the Burmese military regime to develop an open-pit coal mine and power plant at Mong Kok in eastern Shan State, to export both coal and power to Thailand […]