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Land reforms and impact on land use in the uplands of Vietnam and Laos:
Environmental protection or poverty alleviation?
Les réformes foncières dans les montagnes du Vietnam et du Laos : protection
de l'environnement ou lutte contre la pauvreté ?
Olivier Ducourtieux1, Jean-Christophe Castella2*
1. Doctorant INA P-G, Chaire d’Agriculture Comparée, Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon, 16 rue Claude Bernard, 75231 Paris cedex 5, Email: [email protected] 2. Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), B.P. 64501, 34394 Montpellier cedex 5 Tel: +33 (0)4 67 63 69 80, Fax: +33 (0)4 67 63 87 78, Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Environmental protection and poverty alleviation are central to sustainable development as stated in
the Millennium declaration. For many States, land reform is a key leverage point in converting
farming systems into new ones that better address the new priorities.
In the 1990s, the Governments of Vietnam and Laos launched land reforms aimed at: (1) entrusting
the village communities with protecting the forests; and (2) prompting the families to invest more in
intensive farming as a result of more secure land tenure. It is not by chance that similar policies
appeared synchronously in the two countries, as the two neighbouring States share a common history
from French colonisation to market socialism, following a period of planned and collectivist economy.
Both countries were supported by foreign development agencies in implementing their land reforms.
The policy was the result of a timely convergence of goals between groups with diverging interests,
i.e. (i) the socialist model implying control over agricultural production and upland minorities, (ii) the
free-market model from the international development banks, (iii) the scientific forestry model from
industrialised countries and (iv) the conservationist lobby of the environmental organisations.
Nevertheless, there are considerable differences in the agricultural situation both within and between
the two countries, and these differences explain the contrasting results of national and monolithic
policies. Two case studies carried out in neighbouring but different upland regions show how local
communities reacted to the land reforms. Comparison with other case studies in Vietnam and Laos
revealed that the land reforms have had mixed effects both in terms of preservation of natural
resources and of poverty alleviation. Is it possible to reconcile these two goals? This paper
contributes to the debate by bringing new insights into local adaptations in the face of global policies.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 1
Finally, we propose some adjustments to the land reforms with the aim of reconciling the different
aspects of sustainable development (environment, poverty, health, etc.) at complementary spatial and
temporal scales.
Key words
Vietnam, Laos, land allocation, poverty, environment, forest, mountain agriculture.
Résumé
La protection de l'environnement et la lutte contre la pauvreté sont au cœur des stratégies actuelles du
développement durable énoncées par la déclaration du Millénaire. De nombreux Etats utilisent la
réforme foncière comme un outil privilégié de politique agricole pour orienter l'évolution des systèmes
de production agricole vers ces nouvelles priorités.
Dans les années 1990, les gouvernements du Vietnam et du Laos ont initié des réformes foncières avec
le double objectif : (1) d’amener les communautés villageoises à protéger l’environnement forestier ;
(2) d’encourager l'investissement des paysans dans des pratiques agricoles plus intensives grâce à la
sécurisation de la tenure foncière. Le synchronisme et les similitudes des deux politiques ne sont pas
des coïncidences, mais tiennent à la proximité historique entre ces deux Etats voisins, qui sont passés
en quelques années du statut de colonie française à une économie communiste planifiée et collectiviste
puis au libéralisme économique du socialisme de marché. Les réformes foncières ont bénéficié d'un
fort soutien étranger, dans une convergence improbable entre (i) le modèle socialiste de contrôle de la
production agricole et des minorités montagnardes, (ii) le libéralisme des banques internationales de
développement, (iii) la sylviculture scientifique des pays industrialisés et (iv) le courant
conservationniste des institutions environnementalistes.
Cependant les différences marquées entre les deux pays, tout comme les diversités régionales au sein
de chacun d’eux, conduisent les politiques nationales monolithiques à des résultats contrastés. Deux
études de cas menées dans des régions montagneuses voisines mais différentes illustrent les réponses
locales aux réformes foncières. La comparaison avec d’autres situations au Vietnam et au Laos montre
que les résultats actuels de ces réformes sont mitigés, tant pour la préservation des ressources
naturelles que pour la lutte contre la pauvreté. Mais ces deux objectifs sont-ils conciliables ? Nous
contribuons au débat en apportant des éléments de réflexion sur les marges de manœuvre locales face
aux politiques globales et sur les possibilités d’ajustement des réformes pour concilier le traitement
conjoint de problèmes de nature différente (environnement, pauvreté, santé, etc.), avec la prise en
compte de plusieurs échelles spatiales et temporelles.
Mots clefs
Vietnam, Laos, allocation des terres, pauvreté, environnement, forêt, agriculture de montagne.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 2
INTRODUCTION: LAND REFORMS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
In the last twenty years, dramatic changes have occurred in Vietnam and Laos (Figure 1). The
Vietnamese and Lao governments implemented a rapid reform from a centrally-planned socialist
economy to a market-oriented one, while keeping the political control over the communist parties
(Bourdet 2000; Kerkvliet 2005). The economy of both countries still largely relies on agriculture,
their populations are mostly rural (79% in Vietnam and 83% in Laos in 2004), and access to land
determines the resource management options available to small farmers to make a living. The
successive stages of land reforms changed the formerly collective farms into family farms. They
transferred land from State to private ownership in "land allocation" programmes that had similar
goals in the two countries: (i) to prompt the families to invest more in intensive farming as a result of
more secure land tenure; and (ii) to entrust the village communities with the protection of upland
forests (Castella et al. 2006; Ducourtieux et al. 2005).
These reforms had a significant impact on farmers’ practices, i.e. on the ways they crop the land, raise
animals, but also how they sell their products and manage agro-ecosystems. Within a few years,
Vietnam was not only producing enough food for domestic consumption but became one of the
world’s leading rice exporters. Unfortunately, in some mountainous regions, farmers profited much
less from the reforms than others. There is wide disparity in regional development trends following
land reforms partly because the reforms were not implemented homogeneously throughout the country
and also because of the tremendous diversity of natural and human environments they were applied to.
This resulted in different ways of interpreting local success or failure of the land policy to lift marginal
farmers out of poverty or reverse land degradation trends in the mountains (Morrison and Dubois
1995). Furthermore, the inconsistency in the feedback from different sources (e.g. local stakeholders,
officials, NGOs) and different sectors (e.g. forestry, agricultural, poverty programmes) often led to
contradictory discourse about the impact of land reforms and the adjustments needed to achieve
sustainable development.
To learn important lessons from the local changes that took place after land allocation, it is important
to understand how this policy was designed and implemented, and the impact it had on management of
natural resources and on people’s livelihood systems. Local accounts need to be appraised from an
integrative and comparative perspective to disentangle the complex causal relationships between the
ecological, economic and social factors of land-use changes and how they interacted at multiple scales.
We focused our study on two contrasted countries, Vietnam and Laos, which share a common history
and a similar agroecological environment (Rerkasem et al. 1996). We selected two of the poorest
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 3
provinces located in the northern mountains of the two countries, almost at the same latitude (between
21°45’ and 22°20’N): Phongsaly in Laos and Bac Kan in Vietnam (Figure 1). The authors carried out
a four-year and three-step field study: (1) zoning by transects and map survey; (2) interviews with key-
informants (elderly people) within each zone to understand the transformation of agriculture and to
assess the processes and patterns of socio-economic differentiation; (3) interviews with sample
farmers to characterise the different land-use systems and livelihood strategies within each zone from
a technical and economic point of view (Castella and Dang Dinh Quang 2002; Ducourtieux et al.
2005). The two authors each used this methodology in 20 villages and interviewed 300 farmers in
each region.
In this paper, we first compare the principles of the land reforms by reviewing the legal framework
and international context in Vietnam and Laos, and we then propose hypotheses to explain why the
policies are so similar. We then assess their consequences for upland farmer land tenures and land
uses in the two study areas. Comparison with other case studies in Vietnam and Laos provide new
insights into the effects of land reforms both in terms of preservation of natural resources and poverty
alleviation. In the discussion section, we summarise the main lessons learnt from these empirical
studies and we propose some adjustments to the land reforms in order to reconcile these two goals.
LAND REFORMS IN VIETNAM AND LAOS As neighbours, Vietnam and Laos present different agricultural situations and there are also wide
regional disparities within each country. Vietnam has a long coastline open to international exchanges
while Laos is landlocked with a poor communication network. The two countries are similar in size1,
but the average population density in Vietnam is ten times higher than in Laos2. Nearly three quarters
of both countries is mountainous. In the two countries, about one third of the farmers live in the
uplands and rely mainly on shifting cultivation (MFA 2004; Vo Quy 2002). Farming systems vary
considerably according to: (i) latitude and altitude (0 to 3,143 m asl), (ii) social and cultural
conditions with dozens of different ethnic groups, and (iii) differential access to different market
opportunities in a region where globalisation is expanding rapidly
Here we will not review the land reforms and their impact on the country as a whole, instead we
selected two provinces to illustrate what usually happens to upland farmers. In Bac Kan like in
Phongsaly, forest and poverty are the government’s two major concerns as they wish to limit
1 Vietnam: 330,000 km², population of about 80 million; Laos: 236,800 km², population of 5.8 million. 2 Respectively 240 inhabitants km-2 and 25 inhabitants km-2.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 4
deforestation by banning shifting cultivation, and promote income-generating activities to improve
village livelihoods.
The history of the Bac Kan agrarian system in the 20th century can be summarised as a succession of
four different kinds of land-use systems (Castella and Dang Dinh Quang 2002). In Vietnam, before
agricultural collectivisation at the end of the 1950s, land use was relatively extensive, with a single
rice crop per year in the lowlands and shifting cultivation with long fallow periods in the uplands. The
Tay ethnic group occupied the lowlands, while the Dao lived in the uplands. During the collective
period (1960–1988), lowland rice production was intensified thanks to Green Revolution technologies.
Dao farmers were moved to the valley bottoms to contribute to the newly founded cooperatives
alongside Tay households. Cultivation of the hillsides was forbidden and the practice of shifting
cultivation was restricted to a few small fields near the village. In the late 1970s and early 1980s,
agricultural production was unable to keep pace with the growing population of the region, while the
hillsides continued to be under-exploited. The resource base was maintained but the food needs of
people were not being met. Beginning in 1982, a series of reforms led to the eventual dissolution of
the cooperative system and to the allocation of lowland rice fields to farmers proportional to the
number of household members, and then again in 1986, proportional to the labour force of each
family. These successive policies of land allocation and cadastral registration concentrated on the
valley bottoms while the legal status of the hillsides was not clearly defined. This led to an abrupt
return to traditional shifting cultivation practices and an uncontrolled rush for each family to clear and
appropriate as much upland area as possible (Figure 2). Within a few years, most of the forests in the
province had been cleared (Castella et al. 2005). In 1990, there was a spontaneous movement among
the Tay to reclaim their former paddy fields, which had been collectivised in 1960. Families took back
the paddy fields of their ancestors, reproducing the land inequalities of the pre-independence system.
In 1993, the Land Law was promulgated to regulate the runaway exploitation of the uplands by
applying the same solution that had worked in the lowland areas: allocating forestland to individual
households. Forestland was defined according to planned future use rather than present use, and
therefore included the majority of sloping land in the mountainous regions. Forests were classified
into: (i) protected forest, for the preservation of water resources; the prevention of erosion, natural
disasters, and climatic risks; and the overall protection of the environment, (ii) special-use forest,
intended for the conservation of nature and of plant and animal species; scientific research; and the
protection of historic, cultural and tourist sites and (iii) production forest, primarily for timber and
other forest products, and associated with the other types of forest to protect the environment. In
theory, a land-use planning exercise was implemented in each commune prior to land allocation to
make sure that the local distribution of land uses was compatible with the existing land-use plans at
provincial and district levels. In practice, this rarely happened.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 5
The land-allocation process consisted in a series of meetings, beginning at the district People’s
Committee and progressing down the administrative hierarchy to each individual village (Table 1).
Each household who wanted to receive a plot of forestland, usually the plots they already owned under
their traditional land rights, had to fill in a request form, which was sent on to the forest service. The
forest service then measured and classified each individual plot. Once the conflicts that inevitably
arose from the allocations had been resolved at the village level, the forest service integrated the
information into a land map and gave temporary certificates of land-use rights to households. Next, a
meeting was held by the forest service in each village to explain the policy and regulations concerning
forest protection and development. Each household who owned forestland had to sign an agreement to
treat their land accordingly. Each village was then able to develop its own system of forest
management, protection and development based on its own particular circumstances. However, the
rules implemented by all villages were based on model regulations supplied by the forest service. The
top-down implementation of the system favoured neither local participation nor ownership. As a
result, the process of forestland allocation has been slow and was not fully implemented in places
where conflicts over land ownership could not be settled. According to official statistics quoted in the
Annual Work Plan, allocation of forest land ranges from 76%-100% in Cho Don District. The
progress of forestland allocation varies across provinces. By 2001, Lao Cai province had allocated
268,000 ha (49% of its total forest land) forestland and issued land-use certificates to households and
organisations, while Ha Giang had allocated 32% of forestland (165,000 ha) and issued land-use
certificates to different types of owner. At that time, Tuyen Quang province had only allocated
4,800 ha, which is 1% of the total forestland of the province.
In Phongsaly province (Laos), the economy used to rely on shifting cultivation with long forest
fallows (8-18 years) in the sparsely populated region (9 inhabitants km-2). Before the ongoing land
reform, the agrarian system was based on a complex land-tenure system, where each family had land-
use rights bordering on private property3, but social practices controlled land tenure. The village
community chose the stretch of forest to be cleared each year; in this zone, the families planted their
plot (which was passed down from generation to generation) for one to two years with rice combined
with other food crops. The increase in population resulted in a trend towards dividing up the plots
from one generation to the next. The community and family regulation underlying this trend was
complex, based on four successive mechanisms: loan of land between families, extension of crop
duration in slashed fields, emigration to settle new villages, and acceleration of rotations as a last
resort. More recently, members of the younger generation have been leaving Phongsaly on a regular
3 Before 1975, the king of Laos officially owned all the land, but this ownership was merely theoretical and mostly symbolic, especially in remote upland regions like Phongsaly (Vandergeest 2003). Phongsaly farmers applied only customary land tenure, which had been built up over generations (Bouté 2005). When the Lao PDR was founded in 1975, the majority of land property was transferred from the king to the people represented by the State (Stuart-Fox 2001). In practice, the customary practices remained and the very short-term experiment with collectivization did not change anything in Phongsaly.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 6
basis in order not to reduce the size of the family farm to the extent that is impossible for the heirs to
make a living. Although emigration has been constant, only a few people have left each year. The
migrants who left with capital (generally acquired by selling buffalo and cattle) either purchased rice
fields in the plains, or switched to an urban trade. Migrants without capital looked for salaried jobs in
towns or joined the civil service, in particular the Lao army.
The Phongsaly land-tenure system tended to slow down the reduction in the fallow period, a
characteristic response to demographic growth in many other shifting cultivation systems (Sanchez et
al. 2005). This land tenure provided each family with substantial security in access to land,
particularly in the long term, allowing them to: (i) invest in their land, creating rice terraces or
plantations (cardamom, teak, etc.); (ii) maintain long fallow periods thereby contributing to the
protection of the forest and soil as well as maintaining biodiversity; and (iii) finance the development
of other economic sectors through the transfer of capital resulting from farming upon the departure of
emigrants.
After an experiment in Luang Phrabang and Sayabury provinces in the early 1990s and legal
codification (Table 1), land allocation4 started in the Phongsaly district in 1997. Local authorities
divided and classified village arable land on the basis of the existing vegetation and past land use. The
first level of division was dichotomised, separating farmland (defined as areas farmed on a permanent
basis) and forest land (defined as the remaining land of the village, whether wooded or not). Forest
land was subdivided into five categories, from the "conservation forest" (a genuine natural reserve
where farming, animal raising, hunting and gathering are strictly forbidden) to "degraded forest",
which comprises the arable land reserve where shifting cultivation is permitted temporarily5. Farming
areas include fields farmed without rotation (rice fields, gardens, other cash crops) that exist or to be
developed, as well as pasture land. These areas were divided and granted to each household according
to its human resources (consumers and workforce) as planned, but the villagers have still not received
the land titles they were promised. The process ends with the publication of a village map and the
signature of an agreement between the village and the district authorities (Ducourtieux et al. 2005).
The Prime Minister's Office, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry are
responsible for centralised supervision of the policy; the district services of agriculture and finance
implement it in the village under the control of the provincial governor. District agents spend six to
ten days in each village to allocate the village land in a quick eight-step process (Table 1) where
farmer participation is more theoretical than real (Soulivanh et al. 2005; Thongphanh 2003).
According to the laws and decrees, the traditional land tenure that existed before the reform was
theoretically taken into account, but the process was too rapid and the customary village practices
were simply ignored in Phongsaly. From 1997 to 2002, land was allocated in 26 villages in the
4 The literal translation of the Lao name of the reform is "share land, share forest". 5 The fields to clear are allocated so long as they are farmed; tenure security on these plots is deliberately limited to
encourage the farmers to abandon shifting cultivation.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 7
Phongsaly district, i.e. almost a third of the farming communities. In 2002, a local rural development
project negotiated with the government to suspend the programme until the end of 2004 and it has not
yet started up again. Since the programme was officially launched in 1994, land allocation has been
implemented in almost 7,000 villages out of a total of 10,600 in the country (Soulivanh et al. 2005).
AN UNLIKELY CONVERGENCE OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL INFLUENCES IN LAND POLICIES If the land reforms in Vietnam and Laos appear to be amazingly similar and synchronous this is not by
chance. The two neighbouring States shared many common pages in their history over the last two
centuries. The Vietnamese empire reigned over half of Lao territory before French colonisation which
the two countries bore for almost a century (Stuart-Fox 2001). In the 1930s, the clandestine
Indochinese Communist Party, led by the Vietnamese, launched a long struggle against French and
subsequently American forces. It led Vietnam to independence and reunification under the control of
the Vietnamese communist party, and, in 1955, also gave birth to the Lao communist party which,
with strong Vietminh support, took power in 1975 and has ruled Laos since (Brown and Zasloff 1986).
The two countries simultaneously experimented a centrally-planned and collectivist economy - though
in Laos it did not last as long and was less strictly applied than in Vietnam - and in the mid 1980s
shifted to market-oriented socialism when the USSR engaged itself in economic reforms (Bourdet
2000). During the first years of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Vietnam provided economic,
technical and military backup (Stuart-Fox 2001). In 1977, the two States signed a treaty of friendship
and cooperation to formalise their "special relationship". Most of Lao management staff had to
undergo training in Vietnam to be able to aspire to promotion in the administration, the government, or
the party (Stuart-Fox 2001). Throughout recent history the two regimes have shared a similar
conception of agriculture, aimed at ensuring self-sufficiency, providing raw produce to industry and
earning foreign currency through the export of cash products. In both countries, the elite (who live in
the plains) have special plans for the upland regions where ethnic minorities of shifting cultivators
live, aimed at putting pressure on them to give up their "subsistence" economy and integrate the
"modern" economy (Do Dinh Sam 1994; MAF 1999). To this end, the two governments have
implemented resettlement policies combined with a ban on shifting cultivation, and land reform in
their upland provinces (Evrard and Goudineau 2004; Jamieson et al. 1998).
Environmental protection and poverty alleviation are at the core of the current strategies for
sustainable development as stated in the UN Millennium declaration. Multilateral institutions and
bilateral cooperation programmes focus their funding on the two goals and encourage governments of
developing countries to target their social and economic policies likewise. In Vietnam and Laos,
international aid agencies are playing an increasing role in the design of national policies for
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 8
development (Dasgupta et al. 2005; Nørlund et al. 2003). In countries where agriculture plays a major
role in the economy, a classical lever to modernise it towards rural development is reforming the land
system, whatever the economic policy. In the current neo-liberal mainstream, the land market is the
keystone of agriculture and the State is expected to alleviate market shortcomings, but not to intervene
directly (Deininger 2003; Lerman et al. 2002). Typically, the State privatises and titles the land, in
order to:
• secure access to land, which promotes investment to increase profit return per surface unit;
• set up a formal land market, which contributes to funding the national economy;
• make access to credit easier by allowing land mortgage.
Land policies are of fundamental importance to sustainable growth, good governance, and the wellbeing of and the economic opportunities open to rural and urban dwellers—particularly poor people. […] First, providing secure tenure to land can improve the welfare of the poor, in particular, by enhancing the asset base of those, such as women, whose land rights are often neglected. At the same time it creates the incentives needed for investment, a key element underlying sustainable economic growth. Second, facilitating the exchange and distribution of land, whether as an asset or for current services, at low cost, through markets as well as through non-market channels, is central to expediting land access by productive but land-poor producers and, once the economic environment is right, the development of financial markets that rely on the use of land as collateral (Deininger 2003, p. ix-x).
The market-oriented influence of the World Bank in the Vietnamese and Lao land reforms, as in many
other developing countries (Rock 2004), is based on the seldom-explicit presumption that, before the
reform, land tenure was insecure because of informal land rights (Le Roy 2003). It is also logical to
find north-European bilateral forestry cooperation programmes at the spearhead of the support for land
allocation. Since the European Middle Ages, farmers have been excluded from the forest and only
allowed to exploit agricultural areas of the Antique triptych ager / saltus / sylva (Mazoyer and Roudart
2005). This standard was reinforced by scientific forestry which began in Germany in the 18th century
before expanding to other countries and identified farmers as the main enemies of the forest (Scott
1998). More recently, environmental concerns have given more voice to the environmentalist
community. The most radical of them would like to ban human activity from tropical forests in the
name of nature conservation.
The land reforms in Vietnam and Laos resulted from a timely convergence of goals between diverging
interests: the socialist model of control of agricultural production and upland minorities; the free-
market model promoted by the international development banks; the scientific forestry model from
industrialised countries; and the conservationist lobby of the environmental organisations. This
improbable and original conjunction allowed the union of funds and the political will, and hence the
implementation of the programme at such a large scale.
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 9
SIMILAR LAND REFORMS BUT VARIED EFFECTS ON LAND TENURE AND LAND USES In the two study areas, forestland allocation led to contrasted development patterns depending on
village resource endowment (i.e. relative proportions of flat and steep land), on the local institutions
that regulate the use of natural resources, as well as on accessibility, which provides development
opportunities. Consequently, the measurable impacts of the land reforms vary to a large extent
depending on the location of the study and on the scale of analysis, i.e. local or regional.
In Bac Kan, like in many other upland regions in Vietnam, recent remote sensing data show slight
regeneration of the forest cover (Figure 3). This positive trend can be interpreted as a major
achievement of the combined efforts of the government in (i) reducing deforestation through
forestland allocation and a ban on shifting cultivation; (ii) conserving forest resources through the
creation of natural reserves and national parks; and (iii) restoring forests through major plantation
programmes6. For the most recent period, official statistics reveal a general improvement in the living
standards of upland populations (although way behind those of populations living in flatland areas),
which would argue for the positive impact of land allocation on both forests and livelihoods - as
originally intended by the land reform (Le Trong Cuc 2003). But when looking at the local changes
induced by forest land allocation, regional trends mask more contrasted development pathways
(Castella and Dang Dinh Quang 2002). Land allocations in Bac Kan did secure the land ownership
that farmers had already acquired under the traditional land rights. During the rush to clear the forest
in the 1980s, all farmers cropped the hillsides under shifting cultivation, not only the traditional
shifting cultivators as is often claimed. Once they had met the rice production quotas in the paddies,
households who had a surplus labour force could open and appropriate more forest land than those
who had not. The second differentiation factor was the return of Tay people to the paddies of their
ancestors. This led to a situation in which some households have more land than their family labour
force could farm, while others did not have enough (Castella et al. 2005). The result is a general
recovery of the forest cover in the majority of villages (70%) where the former group is dominant,
essentially villages with abundant paddy fields occupied by Tay people. The farmers who were able to
secure individual ownership first of paddy fields and then of sloping lands, intensified paddy
production (thanks to rice double-cropping, chemical fertilisers, and mechanisation), and then
increased their labour investment as well as medium and long-term investment on the hillsides (e.g.
permanent agro-forestry systems, expansion of land under maize combined with pig raising, and
perennial plantations). However, not all families were able to develop such sustainable land uses.
Families who had joined the cooperatives in the later years of collectivisation, like the Dao people,
6 Program 327 “Re-greening the barren hills” and the 5 Million Hectares Program (Le Trong Cuc and Chu
Huu Quy 2002).
Colloque international “Les frontières de la question foncière – At the frontier of land issues”, Montpellier, 2006 10
were deprived of the paddy fields on which they had been working for years and many subsequently
had no other choice but shifting cultivation. As they are limited by the availability of suitable
forestland within their village boundaries, these having been officially delineated during the land
allocation process, the shifting cultivators are now caught in a spiral of poverty. The duration of the
cropping phase has increased from three to eight years and the fallow period has been reduced, with
dramatic consequences for yield and food shortages (Castella et al. 2006). The ultimate result is
further marginalisation of villages that are less endowed with paddy land and of households who are
deprived of access to paddy land, while other villages legitimised the land rights they had already
under the customary laws. For the latter villages, the land allocation policy was concomitant with a
general trend towards paddyland intensification and forest regeneration but the causal relationship had
not been not fully demonstrated, and thus may well have happened without the need for land reform
(Castella et al. 2006). Within a few years, the situation has changed from a large scale, diffuse trend
to deforestation, in which the shifting cultivators were identified as the main culprits, to a gradual
stabilisation and regeneration of the forest cover over large areas, while acute deforestation continues
in a limited number of villages where marginalised farmers were left with no other alternatives than
unsustainable cropping practices. For many ethnic minorities, forestland allocation has led to poverty
traps with no other way to secure a sustainable livelihood than to migrate. In Vietnam, migration
intensified in the 1990s both locally to farm remote and less productive land within their village, and
nationally, for example to supply the coffee pioneer fronts in the Central Highlands in Vietnam.
Forest land redistribution not only increased the discrepancy between farmers but also created social
tensions between different farmers’ groups who rely on the same natural resource base but manage it
in different ways. When the cooperative livestock herds were distributed to individual households
many farmers saw this as an opportunity to accumulate living capital and, for some, to buy back the
paddy land they had lost during the land allocation. However, free grazing by some households
became a major constraint for the development of sustainable cropping practices on the hillsides
(Martin et al. 2004). As a consequence, the local impact of forest land allocation on the stabilisation
of shifting cultivation differed depending on the local institutions and on regulations for access to land
and management of natural resources within the village communities. In Son La province, the system
of allocating agricultural land was different. The farmers resisted individual allocation of both
lowland and upland as it contradicted their customary practice of regular redistribution of land-use
rights according to the size of the farming households. This mismatch between local practices and
policy implementation increased forest degradation (Le Trong Cuc and Chu Huu Quy 2002; Sikor
2001).
In Phongsaly, land reform dramatically changed customary land tenure. In the villages where the
reform has been implemented, more than half of the territories shifted from fallow into forestry
reserves, where farmers are not allowed to practise either agriculture or to forage (gathering, hunting,
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and fishing). If land under shifting cultivation remains unchanged, the main change introduced by
land allocation is the drastic reduction in land under fallow (Figure 4), which has dropped from 21 ha
per family to seven (Ducourtieux et al. 2005). The rotations have been drastically accelerated, with
the average fallow period decreasing from 12 to less than 6 years7. This is insufficient to restore soil
fertility and the labour required for weeding has increased beyond the family labour capacity
(Ducourtieux 2006a). Compared to a village not yet affected by the land reform and with its economy
based on traditional shifting cultivation and collecting non-timber forest products, the average
household income8 in a village where land was allocated has been halved (Figure 5) dropping from
1,200 Euros per year to less than 600 Euros9 (Ducourtieux 2006a).
Mechanisms linking the reduction in the length of the fallow period and decreased productivity are
well known. In most cases, the reduction in the fallow period imposed by land allocation implies
increased invasion of the fields by weeds and thus an increase of about 50% in weeding time, which
was already the main limiting factor for shifting cultivation before the reform. This increased
competition from weeds is added to lower fertility: rice production on slash-and-burn fields is
decreasing, which lengthens the period of rice shortage for the farmers who do not have access to
paddy fields. After land allocation in Phongsaly, rice shortage became the norm for 60 % of the
households (three months a year on average), while previously it had been sporadic (20 % of the
households, 0.5 months a year on average). Some studies in other provinces confirmed this trend:
70% of the families from these villages now face rice shortages for a few months a year compared to
50% before (ADB 2001; Keonuchan 2000; Lestrelin et al. 2005; UNDP 2002). The land reform ends
up impoverishing farmers who have no access to other means of production, which results in the
poorest proportion of the villagers (up to 20% of the population) moving to the cities due to lack of
sufficient farming resources (Vandergeest 2003). On the other hand, the wealthiest farmers, in less
unstable situations, can invest in plots in the new permanent cropping zones thereby increasing their
income (Evrard 2004). Land allocation accentuates the inequalities in the villages, with increased
impoverishment of the most underprivileged farmers, which is in direct contradiction with the stated
aim of reducing poverty.
Did the land reform contribute to forest preservation? In Phongsaly, the newly created village reserves
seem to contribute to the local trend of forest expansion, but the decrease in population since the end
of the 1960s is probably the main factor (Ducourtieux et al. 2005). Elsewhere in the uplands of Laos,
research has shown that deforestation is continuing, perhaps at a slightly slower rate than before the
land reform (Thongphanh 2003). When introducing land allocation as a solution to deforestation, the
7 Before land allocation, this varied from 6 to 16 years depending on the village, and from 2 to 10 years afterwards. 8 Total income, including cash income and self-consumed produce at market value (replacement value). 9 Certainly the difference is not only due to the land reform, but is a result of the combination of public programmes that
affected one village (resettlement, land allocation, mandatory tea cropping) but did not affect the other village in the last ten years. Previously, the two villages shared a history and had a lot of points in common: ecosystem, farming system, culture, access to infrastructure, services and markets, etc. (Ducourtieux 2006b).
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promoters of the policy assumed that shifting cultivation was the main or single cause of deforestation
in Laos. Commercial logging has been approved and can continue at a large scale in forests empty of
farmers (Thongmanivong et al. 2005).
CONCLUSION Our comparative analysis of the design, implementation and impact of land allocation in Vietnam and
Laos revealed greater differences between the villages at each study site than between the two
countries as a whole. This result can be interpreted as the application of a single, common policy to a
highly heterogeneous natural and human environment. With land allocation, the Vietnamese and Lao
States aimed to transfer the management of forest resources to individual households while giving
them formal land rights. This aspect of the policy may be interpreted as a government gesture to
improve the livelihoods of upland peoples. However, in the light of our field surveys, local farmers
experienced the reforms not as a land grant, but as an exclusion from their customary land by the
States. Despite the official public line, the poverty alleviation objective has been pushed backward
and forest protection has taken the lead, in accordance with the objectives of powerful
environmentalist and forestry lobbies.
With relative control established over forest degradation, the concern of upland governmental policies
has shifted to poverty. Now, the poor are more easily targeted as they are trapped within their newly
defined village boundaries. As a consequence, land allocation procedures may be locally suited to the
specific situation of remote ethnic minority villages with high dependence on swidden agriculture,
compared to lowland paddy-based villages. A recent amendment to the land reform under the 2003
Vietnam Land Law is the allocation of forestland to communities instead of to individual households.
This new regulation follows widespread criticism that the previous policy that did not take into
account the customary land rights and therefore had adverse effects on the forest (Sikor 2006). Land
tenure in upland areas is not necessarily insecure, with land access being de facto managed by
traditional community mechanisms. The practices, which differ across different minority groups, are
associated with indigenous knowledge, tradition, and the culture of the community. The recent policy
shift officially recognises that community-based forest management practices have existed for a long
time in ethnic minority communities. Parallel with private and state-based management, this type of
community-based resource management is believed to be relevant and effective in mountain regions
(Le Trong Cuc and Chu Huu Quy 2002). Although community-based forest management has been
under experimentation for years in Laos (Fujita and Phanvilay 2004), the government suspended land
allocation in several provinces (Soulivanh et al. 2005), maybe waiting for a future alignment of its
land policy to the Vietnamese one.
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Devolving the management of forest resources to local communities may reconcile the two goals of
forest protection and economic development. Starting from the premise that farmer’s practices
proceed from rational options, scientists and government officials are in a better position to regulate
local conditions and direct farming systems onto a path that is more in accordance with the nation's
interests. Within the limits of the means to which they have access, the farmers’ aim is to satisfy their
immediate economic needs — which can lead to destructive management of natural resources — but
also to pass on viable households to their children. That is a matter of inheritance strategy, implying
preservation of or even an increase in the productive potential of natural resources on which the
households rely: environmental issues are interconnected with farmer household economics. From
there, it is possible to reform the State's land policies to reconcile environmental preservation and
poverty alleviation (Sanderson 2005). More flexibility is required to enable incorporation of
customary land-use rights into the legal framework. The successful integration of agroforestry and
livestock into cropping systems at some pilot sites has validated the relevance of both participatory
methodologies and an interdisciplinary and farming systems approach to developing sustainable
livelihoods. The recent trend towards decentralisation of natural resources management should be
accompanied by a renewed effort in capacity building and in empowering local communities. On the
other hand, provincial and district authorities generally lack the manpower, resources, capacity and
experience to put into practice consistent and participative land-use policy. They should be allocated
more resources and more time to implement a policy that would satisfy the different (and often
contradictory) objectives expressed at different hierarchical levels. Experience has shown that
promoting the links between land allocation and subsequent extension activities is indispensable for
close interaction with farmers and when directing research to development activities that are relevant
and acceptable to local people. Additional investment in training of extension staff will be critical to
shift their role from the former technology transfer system to their new role as facilitators in a
participatory process of local governance. Farmers should be involved in the process of designing and
implementing public interventions designed to take into account their knowledge and experience in the
sustainable management of the natural resources: they are the solution and not the causes of poverty
and environment issues.
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Land Reform components Bac Kan (Vietnam) Phongsaly district (Laos)
Official governmental goals
Converting the populations of migratory cultivators to a sedentary livelihood system.
Increasing agricultural production by giving farmers incentives to grow perennial crops.
Preserving the deteriorating forest resource base (forest cover of 43% as national goal).
Increase land tenure security. Protect the forest environment Increase fiscal income.
Principles
Land-use planning at provincial, district and community level and down to the individual plot.
Forest and agricultural land classification.
Allocation to individual households and issuance of land-use right certificates.
Divide land into: i) forest area managed by village communities, where farming activities are prohibited or limited; ii) farmland granted to each household for permanent cultivation or pasture.
Legal framework
Decree No. 64/CP on agricultural land allocation (1993).
Decree No. 01/CP right to contract land for protection, regeneration and plantation (1995).
Decree No. 163/CP (1999). Decision No. 178/2001 poor
allowed to use forest products to improve their livelihoods.
Land Law (2003).
Prime Minister's decree on land (1992).
PM decree on forest land use (1993).
PM decree on land allocation (1994).
Minister of Agriculture and Forestry's decree on customary rights and use of forest resources (1996),
Land law (1997). Launch of land allocation 1990 (lowland) 1993 (forestland) 1997
Implementing agencies
People’s Committees (province, district, commune). Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Prime Minister’s Office. Ministry of Agriculture and
Forestry. Ministry of Finance. Provincial governor and local
technical services.
Table 1: Comparison of land allocation processes at the two study sites
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Figure 1: Map of northern Vietnam and northern Laos showing the two study sites
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Vietnam
Laos
Figure 2: Changes in forest cover in Vietnam and Laos (1961-1994)
(index 100 in 1961, sources: FAOSTAT 2004)
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Figure 3: Land-use changes in Bac Kan province (Vietnam)
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Figure 4: Soil occupancy before and after land allocation in 12 Phongsaly villages (Laos) as of 01/01/2005
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Figure 5: Comparison of Household Total Income between a village without land allocation
and a village with allocated land10
10 Certainly the difference is not only the result of the land reform, but also of the combination of public programmes
affecting one village (resettlement, land allocation, tea mandatory cropping) and not another in the last ten years. Previously the two villages shared a common history and had a lot of points in common: ecosystem, farming system, culture, access to infrastructure, services and markets, etc. (Ducourtieux 2006b).
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