Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
provinces, and poor budget expenditure tracking and project monitoring by both the
central and local levels; (ii) a donor-driven agricultural development sector in
which the majority of rural expenditures are in the form of 'off-budget' projects,
which present difficulties for the central government in terms of effective monitor-
ing and co-ordination; and (iii) in part due to the above, provincial levels in Laos
have incurred significant debts to private contractors for state work programs,
which then tend to be reimbursed through the allocation of logging quotas.
The Government of Laos Forest Sector 2020 Strategy document, the official
plan for the sector, includes ambitious targets aimed at reversing a rapid decline in
the nation's forest resource base. State planners stipulate that forest cover should
increase from 41.5 percent (mapped in 2001), up to 60 percent by 2020. Informed
observers however have communicated to the author that the actual figures for for-
est cover in Laos are moving in the opposite direction, and that forest cover will
continue on a sharp decline, likely coming in at less than 30 percent by 2012.
Plantation forestry has in turn been identified by the MAF as a key technical
approach to boost forest cover. The official policy target in Laos is to establish
500,000 ha of industrial plantations by 2020, largely though foreign direct invest-
ments. In addition to leasing large-scale tracts of land to private sector companies,
smallholder farmers in Laos represent an alternate,
in situ
approach to promoting
reforestation. Smallholder tree plantations might also then aid in reducing poverty
in the countryside, and, by transforming the rural peasantry into 'arboreal entrepre-
neurs', helping to move Laos out of 'Low Income Status' by 2020.
Given the chronic fiscal shortfalls faced by the Lao government, the implemen-
tation of this strategy is reliant upon donor funding. Through the 1990s, the ADB's
Industrial Tree Plantation Project (ITPP) was the major tree planting donor initia-
tive active in Laos. It focused on establishing eucalyptus plantations through both
corporate-concession and smallholder-outgrower approaches, on identified degraded
lands.
The next sections focus on the ADB ITPP project, outlining the formal goals and
reviewing the outcomes of this effort. Following this, the paper shifts focus, to the
perspectives of villagers from an ADB smallholder plantation site in Salavane prov-
ince, southern Laos. This will help to explore the ways in which the implementation
and the evaluations of the ITPP project, as well as the planning documents for a
proposed Phase 2 project, tended to frame peasant realities in the Lao countryside
in ways which matched the project's plantation promotion mandate.
13.3
The Lao PDR-Asian Development Bank Industrial Tree
Plantation Project: Outline of Project Activities
The Asian Development Bank funded Industrial Tree Plantation Project was a
significant loan and grant facility aimed at transforming a national forestry sector
characterized by unsustainable and illegal logging of natural forests, and deep
levels of institutional corruption, into an efficient, competitive wood fibre producer.
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