Flash Intro to Contemporary Land Issues in Laos

Several regions in Laos provide a very good example of J. Scott’s Zomia: uncontrolled, unmeasured territories and peoples, despite the many efforts of various (pre/post) colonial State agents throughout history. Let me illustrate this with one piece of the past. Only two decades ago, Laos had a socialist economy. It’s not that farmers in remote rural areas –who still account for 80% of the population– knew exactly what ‘socialist’ was all about. Some of these farmers might have even fought in the 'liberation war', but very few ex-soldiers I've met can truly explain their involvement from an ideological conviction --"I joined because I wanted to be a soldier", "I supported America because they paid us more", "I changed sides when I noticed America was going to lose". Anyhow, when the Pathet Lao took over in 1975, the multi-ethnic nation was directed into a short-lived collectivisation. For the government, the creation of farming cooperatives made perfect sense for food self-sufficiency and the progress of all, regardless of ethnicity. Propaganda was used to increase support, but the slow-paced State interventions did not really modify the ways of living of the majority of ethnic groups. The communist state remained “precariously seated on top of a relatively autonomous, largely natural economy” (Evans 1988: 32), where farmers basically carried on with their household-based subsistence farming, just as they (their parents and grandparents) had done it before. More than the cooperatives, what is possibly the greatest imprint in peoples' understandings and memories of the time was a period of relative stability after many years of turmoil.

When the socialist project admitted economic (albeit not political) defeat –a confession made public in 1985 by Party Secretary-General Kaysone Phomvihane–, a multi layer of State market-oriented policies in the early 1990’s started making peoples' "art of not being governed" (in Scott's terms) truly untenable. Foreign investment, particularly in land, has rushed in and goes quite unregulated. There is a novel and fast-spreading icon in the rural landscape, which is becoming ever-present in rural livelihoods and peoples' experiences: they are called "land concessions" in most reports and scholarly work on Laos. People in Laos refer to them as borisat (companies). 

This phenomenon is not exclusive of Laos; for the past decade many other countries in the 'global south' have increasingly been targeted by what is also termed as "land grabbing", especially after the world food crisis. There is a lot that has been written on transnational land deals, but probably not enough for policy-makers to take effective regulatory action with regards to all the negative consequences for peoples and the environment that have been documented worldwide. However, there is another side of the story that has yet to be acknowledged: the many contradictions met on the ground, especially among the younger generations. 

You will probably imagine that what I am about to document in the upcoming entries will give you the blues. For the most part, I am sure it will. But I hope it will also push you into reflection. The stories I intend to present here cannot be placed in black or white boxes. Personally, what puzzles me is that, despite much hardship, Laotian farmers are experiencing agrarian change in ways that are not necessarily averse to it. Their own understandings and interpretations of 'modernity' and 'improvement' is quite telling of the manner they handle and cope with the extremely fast transformations their lives have been subjected to.  And, against all odds, this observation is also applicable to certain changes brought by land concessions. Before the above is read as if I am on the side of the State or dodgy corporate plans (misinterpretations that often arise when audiences forget to keep a critical open mind or tend to romanticise certain "untouched" territories), Iet me clarify: While most of the people I have met and talked to are not opposed to change towards what they themselves define as a 'better life', they slightly hint at the wish of being capable of deciding how change unfolds, especially with regards to their land. The majority of peoples in Laos have not had a stake in such how, but the reasons are as varied and complex as are the outcomes.