This is a listing of older East-West Center events (newer listed first). See Events to get the list of current or upcoming events.
Research Program Brown Bag Seminar
Land-Use Change in the Greater Mekong Subregion: Challenges and Opportunities
Dr. Jefferson Fox
Coordinator, Environmental Change, Vulnerability and Governance and Senior Fellow
Research Program, East-West Center
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 / Noon-1pm
John A. Burns Hall, Room 3012 (3rd floor)
Rural areas of the Greater Mekong Subregion are being rapidly re-shaped by forces of economic and social change.Researchers are describing variously: rapid deagrarianization as young people seek to escape farm work; growing 'pluriactivity' that combines agrarian and non agrarian livelihoods; extensive displacement by extractive activities and boom crops like shrimp, oil palm, and rubber; decentralization in the administration and funding of natural resource management; and the urbanization of many rural areas. This talk explores the multiple pathways and directions that land-cover changes are taking in the diverse socio-ecological sites (forests, coasts, peri-urban, deltas, etc.) and distinct national contexts of the greater Mekong Subregion. My work has focused on the expansion of rubber across this region and I will focus on rubber as a case study for identifying some of the challenges and opportunities of these changes. Today entrepreneurs from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand are investing heavily in rubber plantations in non-traditional rubber growing areas of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar, northwest Vietnam, and northeast Thailand. The talk describes the different types of rubber farming that are developing in the region, where they are occurring, how extensive they are, and their impacts on the environment and local livelihoods.
Jefferson Fox is the Coordinator of Environmental Studies and a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.He received his Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He studies land-use and land-cover change in Asia and the possible cumulative impact of these changes on the region and the global environment.His ongoing research includes 'Coupled Natural-Human Systems and Emerging Infectious Diseases: Anthropogenic environmental change and avian influenza in Vietnam' funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, and 'The expansion of rubber and its implications for water and carbon dynamics in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia" funded by NASA. He recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to initiate a project in Myanmar entitled 'Natural Resource Management, Democracy, and Human Rights: Building Capacity for Community-Based Resource Management: Enhancing Resource Rights, and Strengthening Civil Society in Kachin State.' He has worked in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China (Yunnan), Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam.
