Building sustainable livelihoods in Laos: untangling farm from non-farm, progress from distress

Abstract

Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world. The majority of households continue to rely on farming to meet their needs. However the country is also going through an important transition as the market extends into formerly remote rural areas. Drawing on surveys of nine villages in three districts, the paper elucidates how households are managing the transition from subsistence to market. Agriculturally resilient communities with considerable potential are contrasted with villages where the scope for increases in farm output are sharply constrained. The growing role of non-farm activities is highlighted and a distinction drawn between `distress' and `progressive' diversification. The paper argues that diversification is propelled by very different forces and has markedly different implications in livelihood terms. It is also suggested that while general statements can be made about livelihood transitions in the country, and the production and reproduction of poverty, at a household level it is often not possible to `read-off' likely livelihood conditions from a mere assessment of resources.

Introduction

Laos, or the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a Least Developed Country in a region of high achievers, and an exception to the popular vision of East Asia as a fast-growing economic powerhouse (Asian economic crisis notwithstanding). But, while the country is still poor and undeveloped in economic terms it is, nonetheless, becoming increasingly tightly drawn into the Asian mainstream, in both material and non-material ways. The country is making the transition from command to market, and subsistence to cash. The neo-liberal agenda is broadly accepted and the World Bank and Asian Development Bank have an important presence in the capital, Vientiane. The government has also accepted, albeit at times with a degree of reluctance, a future in which Laos will become a central component in an increasingly tightly integrated Greater Mekong Sub-region, linking the countries of mainland Southeast Asia and southern China. Laos, in short, is on the move.

The wider picture can be drawn with a degree of surety: Laos is on a path that will make it more monetised, more commoditised, more liberalised, and more integrated. There is less confidence, however, regarding how these policy decisions taken at the centre have filtered down and through to local people in terms of livelihoods and livelihood strategies. Important questions regarding widening inequalities and changing patterns of vulnerability in Laos are only thinly understood. It is the local level effects and responses to the changes initiated at the centre with which this paper is primarily concerned.

The aim of this paper, then, is to shift the focus of discussion away from government policy and development interventions to the issue of how rural households sustain, protect and develop their livelihoods during an era of multiple transitions. We also wish, however, to make a contribution to the wider discussion concerning the interplay of farm and non-farm activities, and how this links to the sustainable livelihoods debate. Finally, the paper is concerned to pick out the divergent livelihood trajectories of both villages and households in a country where rural economy and society are often presented in simplistic and uniform terms. To this end, the paper offers a series of sometimes divergent vignettes of rural life, some drawn at the village level, and some at the level of the household and individual. This complexity of experience is reflected in the narrative approach that we have taken in the central portion of the paper. We have tried to avoid excessively categorising and pigeon-holing the lessons from the field sites because a key point is that to do so would be to gloss over one of the main outcomes of the research: namely, that the trajectories and transitions are creating a mosaic of divergent responses from rural households. It is only in the final section of the paper that we take a step back from the minutiae of the local and reflect upon the wider lessons for Laos and beyond.