Olivier DucourtieuxAfter around fifteen years designing, implementing and evaluating rural development projects in Laos (1991-2007), Olivier Ducourtieux oriented his professional activities towards higher education and research from 2008. Since then, his research focuss on the one hand on the relations between the State and the peasants, in particular the mountain minorities practicing agriculture exposed in the media (slash and burn, poppy, etc.), and on the other hand on the historical construction of the discourses and development and environmental policies that underpin these relationships. In the mountains of South-East Asia, his research demonstrates that the acceleration of deforestation is not the result of populations of forest clearers. Imposing the rapid abandonment of forestry agriculture amounts to making farmers produce unpaid environmental goods in a context of liberalization and international opening of markets. The clearers then find themselves in competition with producers from other countries who are not subject to such environmental constraints, while the freed forest areas become accessible to other agents for accelerated deforestation (mining extraction, silvicultural exploitation, monospecific industrial plantations). , urban sprawl,etc.). He has been involved since 2012 in research funded by AFD, interested in better understanding the dynamics of transformation of rural societies on a local scale: multi-site studies in Guinea (2012) and Ghana (2011); monitoring the impact of the Green Morocco Plan (2014-2016); comparative study of the vulnerability and adaptation of agriculture in the South to climate change (2014-2017); research into the agriculture-deforestation link in Indochinese Asia (2017); research on the processes of socio-economic differentiation and access to land in ex-Soviet irrigated areas in Georgia (2021-2022). Read More Read Less