Agriculture Sector

Since the majority of people in Myanmar are employed in agriculture, MCRB initially planned to conduct a Sector Wide Impact Assessment (SWIA) on agriculture as one of four SWIAs, the others being Oil and Gas (2014), Tourism (2015), and ICT (2015). In 2014, MCRB and the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) analysed the main agriculture commodities grown in Myanmar that were significant and associated with human rights abuses, and held a stakeholder consultation to prioritise these: initial scoping began for SWIAs on rice and rubber.

The proposed Agriculture SWIA was subsequently dropped in favour of conducting a Mining SWIA. This was partly due to mining in Myanmar being a sector with more adverse impacts than agriculture, and of greater interest to civil society. But it was also because the linkage to international markets of Myanmar’s main crops was harder to trace, and therefore leverage was limited. Very few major international soft commodity producers or traders had visible connections to crops produced in Myanmar.

Nonetheless, human rights impacts associated with agriculture were addressed through MCRB’s work on land, indigenous peoples, children and biodiversity.  A Sector Briefing Note on Biodiversity and the Agriculture Sector in Myanmar was prepared as a supplement to MCRB’s series of 2018 publications on Biodiversity, Business and Human Rights.

Following completion of the Mining SWIA, in 2017, MCRB embarked on field research to scope a SWIA of the oil palm sector, which is located only in Tanintharyi Region in South East Myanmar. The SWIA was intended to contribute to following up work by the Tanintharyi Regional Government to rationalise the many concessions handed out under the previous military government and reform the oil palm sector. The intention was to build on Fauna & Flora International’s (FFI) research on the environmental impacts of the sector. It would also draw on the work of civil society organisations on the social impacts of the oil palm sector, particularly land, as well as One Map Myanmar (OMM)’s mapping of oil palm concessions.

Field research was undertaken in late 2017 at 17 oil palm plantations in Tanintharyi Region, and the intention had been to undertake consultations.  For a variety of reasons, a final SWIA was not completed, although research findings were shared in various engagements with stakeholders.

This included an MCRB/Oxfam co-hosted multistakeholder discussion on ‘Responsible investment in plantation agriculture' in Yangon in April 2018. The workshop, which discussed examples of good and bad practice in Myanmar relating to oil palm, bananas and rubber, focussed on the Myanmar legal framework for investment, including land acquisition and regulation of environmental impacts.

In November 2016 MCRB also co-hosted a multistakeholder roundtable in Naypyidaw with PRIME Agrion enhancing food safety and responsible sourcing in primary agricultural production, post-harvest, and food processing.  Inter alia, this conference covered food and agriculture certification standards such as GLOBALG.A.P., Fairtrade, FSSC22000 and the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). In 2018, Parliamentarians were concerned about the environmental impacts of pesticide use in agriculture, particularly bananas.  The Amyotha Hluttaw (Senate) undertook its first ever parliamentary enquiry, on chemical residues, and MCRB made an input drawing on field research on oil palm.