The Adoption of Smallholder Rubber Production by Shifting Cultivators in Northern Laos: A Village Case Study - Smallholder Tree Growing for Rural Development and Environmental Services - page 114

and annual cropping stages. They highlight that tree crops provide an alternative
end-point to the intensification sequence, even at relatively low population densities
and labour intensities. Mercer (2004) reviews evidence of such adoption pathways
for a variety of agroforestry practices and settings.
Thus with population growth and the improvement of rural infrastructure, shift-
ing cultivators in Southeast Asia have frequently been motivated to incorporate tree
crops such as rubber, coffee, and cocoa in their farming systems rather than push
shifting cultivation to its ecological limits, thus necessarily moving beyond subsist-
ence production to at least partial engagement with global markets (Cramb 2007).
This transition typically occurs in a step-wise fashion as an economy develops.
Myint (1973) identifies two stages in the transition from subsistence production to
production for the market. The first stage occurs when farmers use the larger pro-
portion of their resources to produce for their own consumption, but use their spare
land and labour to produce for the market, thereby minimising the risk involved.
The second stage occurs when farmers allocate most of their resources to supplying
the market and rely on purchasing commodities and services, with subsistence
farming a spare-time activity. The shift is accelerated by the improvement of trans-
portation and market infrastructure and the activities of market intermediaries,
encouraging farmers to change from being 'part-time' to 'full-time' producers for
the market. However, smallholders can remain at the semi-commercial stage for
many decades, allowing temporary retreat to a subsistence economy when markets
experience a downturn (Cramb 1993). For example, Dove (1993) has highlighted
how smallholder rubber in particular has provided shifting cultivators in remote
areas of Indonesia with both ecological and economic adaptability for nearly a
century.
According to Barlow and Jayasuriya (1986), the development of smallholder
tree crop cultivation can be classified into three stages, the first two of which corre-
spond to Myint's schema. The first stage is 'emergence from subsistence' when
subsistence production is supplemented by a plantation crop. Simple, labour-inten-
sive tree crop technologies are rapidly adopted by smallholders, typically through
diffusion from estates. This is followed by the stage of 'agricultural transformation'
when smallholder farming becomes largely commercialised and new high-yielding
tree crop technologies are progressively adopted. Finally, the stage of 'extended
structural change' is characterised by the increasing significance of the industry and
service sectors in the economy, rendering smallholder tree crops less profitable due
to the rising cost of land and labour. In a more recent contribution that particularly
focuses on the case of rubber, Barlow (1997) further elaborates on this transition,
distinguishing between the 'early' and 'late' phases of the agricultural transforma-
tion stage.
Barlow and Jayasuriya (1986) and Barlow (1997) show that the development of
smallholder rubber in Malaysia and Thailand has experienced all three stages,
whereas in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam rubber is in the (late) agricul-
tural transformation stage. In this framework, Laos is clearly at the (early) agricultural
transformation stage, with rapid diffusion and adoption of simple labour-intensive
rubber production technologies - though with the benefit of previous technology