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Laos
Index
Most farmers employ one of two cultivation systems:
either the
wet-field paddy system, practiced primarily in the plains
and
valleys, or the swidden cultivation system, practiced
primarily in
the hills. These systems are not mutually exclusive,
especially among the
Lao Loum (see Glossary)
or lowland Lao in areas remote from major river valleys
(see Lowland Lao Society
, ch. 2).
Swidden cultivation was practiced by approximately 1 million
farmers in
1990, who grew mostly rice on about 40 percent of the
total land
area planted to rice.
Swidden agriculture is highly destructive to the forest
environment, because it entails shifting from old to new
plots of
land to allow exhausted soil to rejuvenate, a process that
is
estimated to require at least four to six years. The
extent of
destruction, however, depends on the techniques used by
the farmers
and the overall demographic and environmental
circumstances that
relate to the length of the fallow period between farming
cycles.
Further, traditional agricultural practices allowed for
forest
regeneration and not the stripping of forest cover, which
is a
current commercial logging practice. Swidden fields are
typically
cultivated only for a year, and then allowed to lie
fallow,
although Kammu (alternate spellings include Khamu and
Khmu)
anthropologist Tayanin Damrong reports that at least
through the
1970s some fields were planted two years in a row. An
increasing
population, encroachment on traditional swidden farming
areas by
other villages or ethnic groups, and gradual deterioration
of the
soil as a result of these pressures have led to
increasingly
frequent shortfalls in the harvests of midland swidden
farmers.
The swidden farming process begins with clearing the
selected
fields in January or February, allowing the cut brush and
trees to
dry for a month, and then burning them. Rice or other
crops are
seeded by dibble shortly before the rains begin in June,
and the
growing crops must be weeded two or three times before the
harvest
in October. Swidden farming households are seldom able to
harvest
a rice surplus; in fact, the harvest usually falls one to
six
months short of families' annual rice requirements.
Erosion from deforestation (photos | news) is a direct and serious
result of
swidden agriculture. By the 1960s, however, swidden
agriculture was
not a threat to the forest environment. Moreover, swidden
cultivation is less productive than wet-field cultivation
because
it requires between ten and fifty times as much land per
capita--if
one includes the fallow fields in the calculation--yet
produces
just 20 percent of the national rice harvest. Mature
fallows or
young forests have other benefits such as wild food
gathering,
animal habitat, and watershed protection. Government
policy
following the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism
discourages the practice of swidden cultivation because it
works
against the goals of increased agricultural productivity
and an
improved forest environment. Also, the government wishes
to control
the population in close clusters. However, farmers have
resisted
the change, largely because wet-field cultivation often is
not
feasible in their areas and because no alternative method
of
subsistence has presented itself, especially given the
lack of
markets and infrastructure necessary for cash-cropping to
be an
attractive, or even a possible, venture. Further,
government
traders' defaults on purchase contracts with farmers in
the late
1980s made farmers with better physical access to markets
skeptical
about cash-crop production. In general, despite government
efforts
to increase export-oriented agricultural production, the
"rice
monoculture" persisted in Laos through the early 1990s.
Data as of July 1994
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