Institutionalizing Duality
Lowlands and uplands in the Lao PDR
The recent development strategies proposed by the Lao PDR government and presented to the donor community are strongly contingent upon a sharp dichotomy between the country's uplands and its lowlands.1 The conceptualization of a border in between the inhabitants and landscapes of the Mekong Plain, and those of the mountains above, is nothing new to Laos. But today it is being put forward not according to narrow ethnic criteria, but more generally on environmental grounds. What I examine here is the persistence of this frontier.
By CATHERINE AUBERTIN
The French colonial regime, as its Communist successor, had constructed a model for national unity, for a country comprised of sixty-six distinct ethnic groups (according to the 1991 Constitution, but recently reconfigured again into forty-nine specific ethnicities). These have been aggregated into three broad categories, defined according to the topography, which they supposedly occupy:
-- Lowland Lao (Lao Loum): the Lao-speaking peoples of the Tai-Kadai linguistic group, who in the course of their southward migration pushed the indigenous population upwards into the hills;
Upland Lao (Lao Theun): those former Mon-Khmer plain dwellers displaced by the Lao Loum, now living at mid-slope.
Summit Lao (Lao Sung): the most recent immigrants (from China in the nineteenth century): Hmong-Yao and Tibeto-Burman linguistically, who occupied the highest elevations left unsettled by the Lao Theun.
Such a trinity is the vehicle for a presumed national unity and centralization around the dominant ethnic group (Lao Loum) who comprise a little over half of the country's population. Thereby, the actual history of peopling the landscape and of establishing the present national boundaries at the turn of the last century is being obscured. In Laos, 80 per cent of the land is formally considered mountainous, with 47 per cent of the country nominally under forest cover. Some 60 per cent of the Lao population live in the mountainous regions. The official view, nonetheless, is to consider all upland dwellers as ethnic minorities practicing subsistence-based slash-and-burn cultivation.
In the present environmental approach, the mountains and the forests are conflated. The ecological argument (forest resource protection) is highly emphasized to justify diversely motivated policies, primary among which is integrating the minorities.
The recent Government strategy for the agricultural sector is contingent upon a dichotomy between the 'modernized' lowlands, to be subjected to market forces, and the 'backwards' uplands:, now experiencing large-scale public interventions. Towards meeting a two-fold objective, a fully modern agriculture (irrigated rice) down in the plains, and a forested upland region 'protected' from the minorities, the agroforestry and horticulture systems actually practiced by nearly all Lao farmers are ignored. Such a model of economic development promotes sedentarization and the industrialization of agriculture: both of which may well be ill suited to mountainous ecosystems.
Official statistics (e.g. the agricultural census) translate khao hai, (swidden rice culture production), as upland rice in contrast to khao na (flooded rice production), translated as lowland rice. This tends to obscure the significant reality that within the upland regions, there exists considerable wet rice production in valley bottoms and terraces. The use of such simplistic terminology falsely implies that upcountry Laos only to produce 'upland rice'; it also obscures the widely varying rice production technologies employed by upland peoples.
The forestry resources management strategy similarly creates this sharp frontier between plain and forest dwellers. Slash-and-burn, a symbol of backwardness and an absolute environmental evil, is denounced notwithstanding most empirical evidence as the principle cause of deforestation. Left unmentioned is the monopoly over timber exploitation, countrywide, divided into three holdings controlled by the Lao military.
The Afflicted-by-Poverty vision of upland peoples denigrates and de-legitimizes their knowledge, skills, and 'traditional unsustainable practices'. But only uplanders' practices are so denigrated, as if there were no important threatened forests in the plains. Also, if upland people are affected by poverty, improving the living standards of forest dwellers is no target of the Resources Strategy. Forest management is essentially presenter as a conservation challenge. But then again, in actuality, large-scale exploitation is reserved for State corporations. Prime Ministerial Decree No. 11 reduces forest dwellers' involvement in forest management, thus heavily handicapping conservation projects wishing to engage the local population.
Slash-and-burn
These policies are manifest in forest zonation (some 70 per cent of the forested area is classified as a protected zone), in the creation of National Biodiversity Conservation Reserves and in land allocations favouring the privatization of communal resources. Reducing the available land acreage per family to three times the maximum that they can cultivate in a single year clearly implies a three-year rotation, and precludes slash-and-burn. The forest policies also include the effective displacement of upland ethnic minorities down onto the plains. Such solutions bring into question the very survival of those populations.
These policies, however, do meet the objectives of interest groups otherwise very sharply opposed. Wrongly identifying the 'non-plain' dwellers with the forest itself has institutionalized a concept of the mountains as a problem-ridden site. Problems, moreover, requiring external solutions. the defense of the environment, the struggle against drugs (most opium production is located at elevations over 1000 m), national unity, and industrial interests in timber and hydropower. The practice of slash-and-burn is held to destroy the forest, and is therefore threatening the hydrology of major hydropower schemes (already the principal source of foreign currency and a sector set for great expansion), as well as the river's water supply and thence the irrigation in the plains.
Thus, upland people are denounced as poor and ignorant, armed and dangerous. In the name of wildlife protection, mountain-dwellers have seen their firearms confiscated. Government is both seeking to integrate minorities into the national economy and assert its own control over the national territory. With the knowledge that about half of the country's villages are inaccessible to motor vehicles during the rainy season. Their inhabitants are thus being relocated into 'focal zones' down in the lowlands where possible, or otherwise along the highways.
The negative effects of such resettlements including land pressures in the plains, marginalization of the displaced populations, lack of basic infrastructure (e.g. water supply) in resettlement sites, and absence of agricultural extension services have been evaluated critically elsewhere. Originally supporting uplands resettlement schemes, donors (AsDB, the EU, UNDCP, JICA, and Sida) have now nominally taken their distance, but still are largely funding the land allocation programs directly threatening the survival of mountain peoples.
Notes
1 The Government's Strategic Vision for the Agricultural Sector A discussion paper prepared for the Donor Round Table Conference, Vientiane, 8-9 November 1999.
References
Strategic Vision of Forest Resource Management to the Year
2020, Policy Dialogue Meeting on Round Table Process 2000-2002, Luang
Prabang,
8-9 September 2000.
Dr Catherine Aubertin is an economist and the Research Director of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Paris, France.
E-mail: Catherine.Aubertin@bondy.ird.fr