Laos: Laos Agriculture Profile

2014 rice production is estimate to decrease slightly

Harvesting of the 2014 major (wet) season paddy crop is currently underway and will continue until the end of December. FAO’s current estimate for the accumulation 2014 rice output (inclunding the ongoing major season and the forthcoming 2014/15 secondary seasons), stands at 3.3 million tonnes, about 3 % below last year’s production. The slight decline is on account of heavy rains in early August that caused localized flooding across northern and central parts of the country, resulting in some crop losses. In addition, relatively low rice prices at sowing time resulted in a slight contraction in the area planted for the major season rice crop, further contributing to the expected production decrease.

The 2014 maize output is estimated by FAO at 1.13 million tonnes, marginally below last year’s high level.

Cereal exports in 2014 are estimate to increase from last year’s high level

Cereal exports for the 2013/14 marketing time(January/December) are estimate at 340 000 tonnes, some 6 % above last year’s high level, mainly reflecting bumper cereal harvests in 2013. Most of this volume is maize, exports of which are estimate slightly higher than last year’s above-average level of 280 000 tonnes. Much of the trade takes place with Thailand, Viet Nam, Cambodia and China. The country is expected to remain additional-or-less self-sufficient in rice.

Food insecurity remains a concern in some parts of the country

Despite steady economic increase, food insecure areas exist at the sub-national level. Ethnic groups and children living in remote and rural areas are particularly vulnerable. Approximately 90 % of the rural people derive their gain from the agricultural sector. The floods in August 2014 affected at least 120 000 people, damaging houses and infrastructure.

The new available official data indicated that the national year-on-year inflation rate in September 2014 was 3 %.

At least 5 million hectares of Laos's total land area of 23,680,000 hectares are suitable for cultivation. 17 % of the land sector(between 850,000 and 900,000 hectares) is actually cultivated, less than 4 % of the total area.

Rice accounted for about 80 % of cultivated land during the 1989- 90 growing season, inclunding 422,000 hectares of lowland wet rice and 223,000 hectares of upland rice. This demonstrates 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 % from 1975-77 but in 1987 only provided citizens with less than one-fourth of a hectare each, given a people 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 was the foundation of the economy. Although a slight downward trend in the sector's contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) was evident throughout the 1980s and early 1990s—from about 65 % of GDP in 1980 to about 61 % in 1989 and further decreasing to between 53 and 57 % in 1991—a similar decrease in the % of the labor force working in that sector was not readily apparent.

Some sources identified such a downward trend—from 79 % in 1970 to about 71 % in 1991. Both the LPDR's National Planning Commission and the World Bank reported that 80 % of the labor force was employed in agriculture in 1986. Available evidence thus suggests that the % of the labor force employed in agriculture in fact remained relatively steady at about 80 % throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Agricultural production grew at an average annual rate of between 3 and 4 % between 1980 and 1989, almost double its increase rate in the preceding decade, despite two years of drought—in 1987 and 1988—at the same time as production actually declined. paddy rice production declined again in 1991 and 1992 as well because of drought. By 1990 the World Bank estimated that production was growing at an increasingly faster rate of 6.2 %. Increased production, long one of the government's goals, is a result in part of better use of improved agricultural inputs during the 1970s and 1980s.

The area of land under irrigation had been expanding at a rate of 12 % per annum since 1965, so that by the late 1980s, irrigated land constituted between 7 and 13 % of total agricultural land. Although still a small %, 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 %; given that commercial fertilizer use had been virtually nonexistent in the late 1970s, this, too, is an significant, if small, succcess 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.

Most farmers employ one of two cultivation systems: either the wet-field paddy system, practiced primarily in the plains and valleys, or the slash-and-burn cultivation system, practiced primarily in the hills. These systems are not mutually exclusive, particularly part the Lao Loum or lowland Lao in areas remote from major river valleys (see Lowland Lao Society, ch. 2). Slash-and-burn cultivation was practiced by approximately 1 million farmers in 1990, who grew mostly rice on about 40 % of the total land area planted to rice.

Slash-and-burn 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 in general 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.

Slash-and-burn fields are typically cultivated only for a year, and again 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 people, encroachment on traditional slash-and-burn 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 slash-and-burn farmers.

The slash-and-burn farming process begins with clearing the selected fields in January or February, allowing the cut brush and trees to dry for a month, and again burning them. Rice or other crops are seeded by dibble in a little while before the rains begin in June, and the growing crops must be weeded two or three times before the harvest in October. Slash-and-burn farming households are seldom able to harvest a rice surplus - the harvest usually falls one to six months short of families' annual rice requirements.

Erosion from deforestation is a direct and critical result of slash-and-burn agriculture. Moreover, slash-and-burn 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—from presently on produces just 20 % 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 slash-and-burn cultivation because it works against the goals of increased agricultural productivity and an improved forest environment. As well, the government wishes to control the people in close clusters. 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, particularly 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.

The government encourages animal husbandry through programs for cattle breeding, veterinary services, cultivation of pasture crops, and development of fish, poultry, and pig stocks. Between 1976-78 and 1986–88, the stock of all farm animals increased greatly: cattle by 69 % to 588,000 chief; goats by 128 % to 73,000; pigs by 103 % to 1.5 million; horses by 59 % to 42,000; buffaloes by 55 % to 1 million; and chickens by 101 % to 8 million.

Increases would have been significantly better without diseases and a persistent shortage of animal feed. Disease is a critical problem: there is a significant annual mortality of chickens and pigs in most villages, and buffaloes are as well frequently subject to epidemics.

Rice is the major crop grown during the rainy season, and under usual conditions, rainfall is adequate for rice production. However, if rain ceases to fall for several weeks to a month at a critical time in the rice growing cycle, yields will be significantly affected. Upland rice varieties, although adapted to a lower moisture requirement, are as well affected by intermittent rains because farmers have no means of storing water in their fields.

Rice accounted for over 80 % of agricultural land and between 73 % and 84 % of total agricultural output of major crops throughout the 1980s, except in 1988 and into the early 1990s (see table 4, Appendix). Rice paddies as well yield fish in irrigation ditches in na (lowland rice fields). Production of rice additional than doubled between 1974 and 1986, from fewer than 700,000 tons to 1.4 million tons; however, drought in 1987 and 1988 cut annual yields by nearly one-third, to about 1 million tons, forcing the government to rely on food aid for its domestic requirements.

In 1988 and 1989, some 140,000 tons of rice were donated or sold to Laos. With improved weather and the gradual decollectivization of agriculture—an significant measure under the New Economic Mechanism—rice production surged by 40 % in 1989. The increase in production reflected the importance of the agricultural sector to the economy and was largely responsible for the economic recovery following the droughts.

In 1990 production continued to increase, although at a much slower rate, and the point of self-sufficiency in rice was reached: a record 1.5 million tons. Sufficiency at a national level, however, masks considerable regional differences. The southern Mekong provinces of Khammouan, Savannakhét, and Champasak regularly produce surpluses, as do Vientiane and Oudômxai provinces, but an inadequate transportation system often makes it easier for provinces with shortages to purchase rice from Thailand or Vietnam than to purchase it from other provinces.

According to some sources, the % of the labor force engaged in rice production declined gradually, by over 30 % between 1986 and 1991, a trend encouraged by the government because it tended to increase export-oriented production. However, some feared this trend would threaten sustained self-sufficiency in food, an extra key goal of the government. Sustained selfsufficiency however, additional likely depends on a continued increase in the use of agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and improved strains of rice, and on the implementation of extension and research services rather than on the actual number of workers involved in planting.

The in general increase in rice production throughout the 1980s was the result of higher productivity per hectare, rather than of an increase in the land area planted in rice; in fact, the area planted in rice decreased during the 1980s, from 732,000 hectares in 1980 to 657,000 hectares in 1990. Because farmers make little use of fertilizers or irrigation, however, most land still yielded only one annual crop in the early 1990s, despite government efforts to foster the use of double-crop rice.

Laos produces two major types of coffee: Robusta and Arabica. Robusta is mainly used for regular coffee inclunding a typical coffee drink in Laos where they sweeten it with condensed milk. The latter, Arabica, is of a higher quality due to its mild taste, and it is used for espresso. For the 20,000 tons of coffee that Laos produces a year, 5,000 tons are Arabica beans and 15,000 tons are Robusta.