Project overview
The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) funds research projects in regions of Asia, Africa and the Pacific, focusing on crops, agribusiness, horticulture, forestry, livestock, fisheries, water, climate, social sciences, and soil and land management. It aims to help improve food security and reduce poverty for smallholder farmers, create more sustainable food production processes, increase gender equity, and build scientific capability.
The organisation’s work also has the potential to enable valuable knowledge sharing between people in ACIAR’s partner countries and those in Australia who face similar challenges – including farmers, the rural poor, consumers, researchers and policymakers.
Solution delivered
ACIAR asked Editor Group to edit two research reports from a four-year study into the livelihoods of the many farmers who work on and/or own small landholdings in Myanmar. It focused on finding ways to enable farmers adopt new technologies, and to help the country to develop agricultural capacity and policy.
The wide-ranging study on which the reports were based considered how factors such as household structure, education, ethnicity, gender, religion, access to water, land size, and vehicle and land ownership affect the livelihoods of rural populations. The reports highlighted the important roles that the landless rural population play in resource production, as labourers, livestock graziers and fishers. They also showed that although 80 per cent of Myanmar’s population lives in rural areas, labour scarcity is becoming a problem in some regions.
Our editors carefully streamlined the statistics-heavy narrative in the reports, ensuring the language was active and easy to read. They checked that the written elements were consistent with the many charts depicting the results of the study’s surveys and focus group discussions. As the two reports covered the same research topics in two areas of Myanmar, the editors made sure that the style and tone of these companion documents was consistent.