Pho Phyu had already been to jail twice. However, this did not deter the lawyer from joining with farmers in October in staging an unprecedented protest against a new draft Land Act that is currently awaiting approval—one of two cases pending against him for which he is on bail.

He carries, he says, the burden of 10,000 mouths on slight, yet confident shoulders, advocating as he does for 1,500 delta farmers who have had their land seized by big companies with connections to the government.

Pho Phyu estimates that since the new government took office in March last year some 10,000 acres of farmland have been seized in Rangoon and Irrawaddy divisions alone.

“Under the new law, millions of acres that have been seized by big companies will legally belong to them, and not the farmers,” says Pho Phyu.

Amid a tide of optimism, this is a dark area which some, such as Pho Phyu, believe is not only not progressing but could get worse. It covers the 70 percent of Burma's work force and their families who are small-scale farmers. A majority who will not be affected by the easing of Internet restrictions, or will probably never know that the BBC are now allowed to visit their country.

This as part of the government's reforms to change the economy to a market-orientated system, including the agriculture sector. Former government adviser and economist Khin Maung Nyo corroborates: “We need to change agriculture into a business.”

This impetus is driven by a new land act, which sources said is a subject of much debate that is now with being handled by the parliamentary bills committee.

Land ownership has been a grey area in Burma ever since the 1963 Land Act initiated under the then new government of Ne Win, which nationalized ownership of all land. The decline in the rule of law has made entitlement and propriety problematic ever since.

As a result most agree that the country needs a new Land Act, but new legislation seeks to push small farmers off their land and consolidate ownership among a few large corporations.

In addition, the 1963 legislation, according to Nick Cheeseman of the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), “gave farmers cultivation rights. They could not be forcibly removed from land they were cultivating, or be removed from land because of debt.”

The new law has no much provisions say critics, allowing for absentee landlordism and the seizure of land for large scale non-agricultural uses.

According to a November statement of the AHRC, the new act, “is a law that has been written for the interests of powerful businessmen whose companies are already causing massive hardship and misery to people in various parts of Burma, and who are lining up to grab as much territory as possible.”

“They don't want the farmers and workers to be united,” said Pho Phyu. “The MPs have business interests. Most of the MPs are from the business or military groups, so in relation to such interests they make the law.”

Pho Phyu labels a number of companies who he alleges have seized farmers' land, among them Htoo Trading headed by flamboyant business tycoon Tay Za, who has been sanctions-listed because of his links to the previous military regime. Also named was Yuzana, one of the country's largest producers of the national dish, lapethoe (pickled tea leaves).

“The worst is MP U Aung Than Oo who owns Pin Le Khoo Twe,” says Pho Phyu of the Union Solidarity and Development Party MP for Thanlyn township in Rangoon.

The new land act necessitates that land dispute cases go to bodies under the Agricultural & Irrigation Ministry, under a process the AHRC says, “aggrandizes executive power.”

“Under the draft law's section 21, the Agriculture & Irrigation Ministry would have the power to alter or overturn any decisions taken in any one of the new land agencies,” the AHRC statement explains.

The new law, says Pho Phyu, is vague. For instance, terminology legitimizes seizures if they are viewed by the government as in the national interest, which, he says, enables land to be seized for non-agricultural purposes—on past record a policy that is deeply corrupt and cronyistic.

“We need to define exactly what they mean. Otherwise they can take whatever and whenever they like,” he adds.

Most agree that Burma cannot neglect the agricultural sector. While employing the vast majority of the population of the country it also equates to roughly 43 percent of GDP—comparing to the 1938 figure of roughly 48 percent.

The process of people moving from rural agricultural subsistence to cities for work is a universal capitalist occurrence as a country develops, but for Pho Phyu the prospects for his clients don't look bright if they leave their land.

“They don't have much education and they have to take low-level work in Rangoon or in border towns, riding a trishaw or as casual laborers … the children have to work and cannot attend school.”

Economists disagree about the move to consolidate agricultural land ownership. What could be compared to a an Enclosure Act, as it was known in the first instance, in the birth of capitalism in the UK. Many contend that it will increase productivity, that the economies of scale of more commercialized farming will produce greater outputs, owing to greater inputs, such as fertilizers and mechanization.

However, for Professor Sean Turnell of Australia's Macquarie University, “It's true that what we are talking about is a liberalizing or pro-business development at one level, but because it so favors larger enterprises I worry that any efficiency gains from larger scale production could be offset by the socio- economic damage of people being implicitly or explicitly forced off their land.”

“Crops like rice, many studies seem to show, are better done on family farms in poor countries than on plantations and the like—especially given the inputs required by the latter. In a country with abundant but under-utilized rural labour, small scale production is also a significant employer.”

While the government has committed verbally to a market-oriented economy there also seems fears that the law will give explicit control over the sector to government, inducing worrying memories of the country's ignominious experiment in command economics.

“Under section 23, the president is given full authority to issue instructions over the use of land for particular purposes in any part of the country,” says the AHRC. “The past record of centralized land management and planning in Burma has been one of abject failure.”

So much so that in 1966, a mere four years after Ne Win's coup, political scientist Josef Silverstein quoted the general-turned-pseudo socialist saying, “If Burma were not a country abundant in food we would be starving.”

Indeed as the likes of the IMF herald a new economic dawn, Burma's  Deputy Labour Minister Myint Thein warned that, “We have to find out how to solve the problem of rising unemployment, which is increasing in line with the population.”

The Myanmar Times quoted Myint Thein saying that of a total workforce of some 36 million around 1.22 were unemployed. This figure would naturally increase as farmers such as the ones represented by Pho Phyu are pushed off their land. One has to remember that around 6 million Burmese find work outside the country's borders.

Myint Thein further added: “We confess that the ministry alone cannot solve the rising unemployment rate.”

Unemployment is a problem for the Labour Ministry, but perhaps conversely not for the market-orientated system as a whole. For geographer Professor David Harvey in his book The Enigma of Capital, “The dispossession of the mass of the population from direct access to the means of production (land in particular) releases labour power as a commodity into the market place.”

Without what Marx termed an “industrial reserve army” (“docile, manipulable,” hungry, unemployed people) then, according to Harvey, “capital faces a serious barrier to continuous accumulation.”

Sources close to the government corroborate with Pho Phyu and the theory that the USDP fought hard to prevent farmers from being included in the otherwise progressive Labour Organization Bill, that was signed into law in October.

In other words, Burma's transition to a market-oriented economy would face a serious challenge if the majority of the population were self-sufficient, small-scale farmers who were not willing to undercut laborers elsewhere in Asia in stitching training shoes for export.

If the 70 percent of the population had a mandate and decided they would rather stay on their farms then the cost of labor in new ventures such as Dawei would be far less competitive than say, neighbouring Bangladesh.

Chief government economic adviser U Myint corroborates in a 2009 report, “It will be desirable for Myanmar to recognise that its most valuable resource is not its rich agricultural land, its forests, its mineral reserves, or its hydrocarbon deposits. It is its people.”

Pho Phyu laughs at the prospect of jail, one which he claims has been ordered by Myint Swe, the chief minister for Rangoon Division. While the Labour Act is debated by ministers, it is clear that the battle that quietly goes on for the future of the vast majority of working Burmese is far from over.