Abstract

This Discussion Paper anticipates the potential impacts and impoverishment risks of the Suai Supply Base Project in Timor-Leste, paying particular attention to the project’s likely gendered impacts and the evolving tensions between the state’s powers to expropriate land and customary land access. In doing so it draws on Cernea’s framework for identifying the impoverishment risks of large-scale land acquisitions (Cernea 1997, 2000) and Behrman et al.’s (2012) analysis of the gender implications of large-scale land deals. The first section describes patterns of land access and the vulnerability and dependency of local communities on land. The second section details the politics of the Suai Supply Base and the process of land acquisition. This is followed by discussion of some of the potential impacts that the land acquisition may have on local communities in Suai.