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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Laos
Index
At least 5 million hectares of Laos's total land area
of
23,680,000 hectares are suitable for cultivation; however,
just 17
percent of the land area (between 850,000 and 900,000
hectares) is,
in fact, cultivated, less than 4 percent of the total
area. Rice
accounted for about 80 percent of cultivated land during
the 1989-
90 growing season, including 422,000 hectares of lowland
wet rice
and 223,000 hectares of upland rice, clearly demonstrating
that
although there is interplanting of upland crops and fish
are found
in fields, irrigated rice agriculture remains basically a
monoculture system despite government efforts to encourage
crop
diversification. Cultivated land area had increased by
about 6
percent from 1975-77 but in 1987 only provided citizens
with less
than one-fourth of a hectare each, given a population of
approximately 3.72 million in 1986. In addition to land
under
cultivation, about 800,000 hectares are used for
pastureland or
contain ponds for raising fish. Pastureland is rotated,
and its use
is not fixed over a long period of time.
In the early 1990s, agriculture remains the foundation
of the
economy. Although a slight downward trend in the sector's
contribution to gross domestic product
(GDP--see Glossary)
was
evident throughout the 1980s and early 1990s--from about
65 percent
of GDP in 1980 to about 61 percent in 1989 and further
decreasing
to between 53 and 57 percent in 1991--a similar decrease
in the
percentage of the labor force working in that sector was
not
readily apparent. Some sources identified such a downward
trend--
from 79 percent in 1970 to about 71 percent in 1991--but
both the
LPDR's State Planning Commission and the World Bank
reported that
80 percent of the labor force was employed in agriculture
in 1986.
Available evidence thus suggests that the percentage of
the labor
force employed in agriculture in fact remained relatively
steady at
about 80 percent throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Agricultural production grew at an average annual rate
of
between 3 and 4 percent between 1980 and 1989, almost
double its
growth rate in the preceding decade, despite two years of
drought--
in 1987 and 1988--when production actually declined. Paddy
rice
production declined again in 1991 and 1992 also because of
drought.
By 1990 the World Bank estimated that production was
growing at an
increasingly faster rate of 6.2 percent. Increased
production, long
one of the government's goals, is a result in part of
greater use
of improved agricultural inputs during the 1970s and
1980s. The
area of land under irrigation had been expanding at a rate
of 12
percent per annum since 1965, so that by the late 1980s,
irrigated
land constituted between 7 and 13 percent of total
agricultural
land. Although still a small percentage, any increase
helps to
facilitate a continued rise in agricultural productivity.
Smallscale village irrigation projects rather than large-scale
systems
predominate. Use of fertilizers increased as well, at an
average
annual rate of 7.2 percent; given that commercial
fertilizer use
had been virtually nonexistent in the late 1970s, this,
too, is an
important, if small, achievement in the government's
pursuit of
increased productivity. In addition, the number of
tractors in use
nearly doubled during the decade, from 460 tractors in
1980 to 860
in 1989.
Data as of July 1994
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