Rural livelihoods and constraints to commercial farming in Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar

Myanmar is a country in rapid economic and political transition, with opportunities emerging for its smallholders to benefit from current economic growth. However, many smallholders are trapped in semi-subsistence agriculture, disconnected from agricultural markets. Commercialisation of smallholder agriculture provides a pathway to improved livelihoods. However, there are many constraints to commercialisation that prevent this process from occurring. This study investigates constraints to commercial farming in two townships (districts) of the Tanintharyi Region. A representative two-stage sample of 259 households was drawn from the townships of Myeik and Palaw. A structured questionnaire gathered information from rural households on household livelihoods, food security and agricultural enterprises. Descriptive statistics presented in this paper provide valuable insights into this poorly understood area. Multivariate techniques are used to identify and rank the constraints to commercial farming. Listed in order of their relative importance, significant constraints included the household’s land endowment, its liquidity, land quality, productive assets, ethnicity, tenure security, and labour endowment. The paper concludes with evidence-based recommendations of relevance to development practitioners, donors and policy-makers, foremost amongst which is the need for affordable credit to alleviate constraints to commercial farming

An Imperfect Legacy: The Significance of the Bancoult Litigation on the Development of Domestic Constitutional Jurisprudence

This essay will explore the constitutional significance of the decisions in R (on the application of Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Office (No. 1) 2001 Q.B. 1067, R (on the application of Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No. 2) 2008 UKHL 61, R (on the application of Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No. 2) 2016 UKSC 35 and R (on the application of Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No. 3) 2014 EWCA Civ 708. The imperfect legacy of the Bancoult litigation deserves a special place within the constitutional jurisprudence of the United Kingdom. At the very core of the decisions in Bancoult (No. 1) and Bancoult (No. 2) was the relationship between the common law and the prerogative, a relationship which, as this essay will argue, ought to have imposed limitations upon the Crown. It will be argued that the decision of the House of Lords in Bancoult (No. 2) demonstrates how a failure of the common law's role to `admeasure' the prerogative amounts to `bad law', especially where, as was in the case of colonial legislation in Bancoult (No. 2), there is arguably ineffective parliamentary oversight. Furthermore, the Bancoult litigation raises issues of the normative purpose of accountability of the prerogative and the competing interests of constitutionalism, national interest and public opinion. In terms as to whether the decision to remove the right of abode could be reviewed by the courts, the national interest of the United Kingdom was an important consideration. The Bancoult litigation highlights the uneasy legacy of colonialism, namely, the treatment of British colonial subjects, the attempts to deny or fetter the rights of these subjects to return home or to engage in economic enterprise, and the limitations on seeking redress before the domestic courts and at the European Court of Human Rights (see Bancoult (No. 2), Bancoult (No. 3) and Chagos Islanders v United Kingdom (Admissibility) (2013) 56 E.H.R.R. SE15)

The Chagossians’ struggle and the last bastions of imperial constitutionalism

The scale of the injustice inflicted upon the Chagossians by the United Kingdom is self-evident, but their legal route to redress has proven opaque and fraught with difficulty, as illustrated by the House of Lords’ majority decision in R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No 2) [2008] UKHL 61; [2009] 1 AC 453. This disconnect is, nonetheless, inherent in the UK’s constitutional order. Constitutions outline the operation of governance orders, with constitutionalism injecting substantive principles into this picture, developing the relationship between the holders of power and those subject to its exercise. But not all constitutionalising projects are devoted to the same ends. The legal saga of the Chagossians throws into sharp relief the disparity between the imperial constitutionalism which was constructed to organise the governance of the United Kingdom’s colonial possessions in the mid-nineteenth century and the principles which supposedly underpin its liberal democracy in the twenty-first. The denial of substantive protections for a colonised community against unchecked and oppressive exercises of executive power sits uneasily with the prevailing understandings of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements, even though the constitutional architecture of the British Empire was designed to achieve this very end. Drawing upon archival material which highlights how differently the Chagossians were treated from ‘settler’ communities such as the Falklanders, our paper reassesses the Chagossians’ legal struggle in light of the hurdles that this bifurcated constitutional order places in their path, and the significant impacts of their efforts to navigate these barriers to justice upon this constitutional structure