In this study, participant farmers in the JICA assisted project, a livelihood improvement project for the southern mountainous and plateau areas of Laos, were targeted. The objective of the study was to examine whether support received from the project for particular livestock species enabled farmers to depend on that livestock for their sustenance and also whether this influenced their livelihood diversification activities. Results showed that participant famers in the project intervention group do not concentrate on a single activity, but rear multiple kinds of livestock in order to diversify their sources of income. The shift to a money economy in the rural areas of southern Laos has made buffalo, cattle, and goat play a larger role as movable property and savings, whereas pigs and poultry are often the main sources of cash income. The study also found that chicken has commonly been consumed as a source of protein in the area; however, farmers rarely consumed beef, pork, and goat meat. It is also discovered that although there is an increase in the number of farmers who use formula feed for livestock from outside, most of the livestock has still been kept in the rice-based integrated production system that does not rely on outside resources.

Land prices in Vietnam’s metropolises of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are extremely high at their current level of economic development. Through analysing the system of land development in Vietnam, the study found that the high land prices are due to the low supply of agricultural land for conversion, which cannot meet the growing demand for homes in both cities. On one hand, agricultural households are reluctant to sell their land to developers because of the low compensation. On the other hand, developers are less motivated to increase their investment due to the volatile land market and the high tax level. In order to circumvent the stated problems, the study recommends that agricultural households should receive higher compensation, while taxes should be decreased for land developers. This will simultaneously increase the willingness of both agricultural households and developers to convert agricultural land for urban use.

Recently, the increasing in the rate of abandoned cultivated land has resulted in a marked decrease of farmlands. Farmlands have various functions and play an important role in our lives. Therefore, it is necessary to promote conservation of farmlands. Moreover, although non-croplands don’t fall under the purview of abandoned cultivated land in the statistical survey “Census of Agriculture and Forestry”, non-croplands to an extent have become part of abandoned cultivated land or are most likely to be so in the near future. In this study, we analyzed the occurrence of non-croplands in Ayabe City, Kyoto, Japan. The purpose of this study was to analyze the current state and factors influencing the occurrence of non-croplands, and construct a high accuracy model for predicting the occurrence of non-croplands. For analysis of the factors mentioned above, we constructed a random forest prediction model and calculated the variable importance score (random forest is one of the machine learning algorithms). Besides, we verified the accuracy of the model by using cross-validation. The analysis results demonstrated that non-croplands have increased year upon year in Ayabe City. Also, it was suggested that the type of farmer, distance to densely inhabited district (DID), and farmland leasing were significant and important factors influencing occurrence of non-croplands. Further, as a result of cross-validation, the average accuracy of the random forest model, which consisted of 14 explanatory variables, was 97.4%. It was demonstrated that our model could predict the occurrence of non-croplands with high accuracy.