Forests, marketization, livelihoods and the poor in the Lao PDR

Abstract

The Lao PDR is making the transition from subsistence to cash, and command to market. Rural communities are being drawn ever more tightly into the embrace of the market economy and of the central state. The construction of roads, schools and health centres, the provision of credit and new crops and technologies, and the arrival of traders and the panoply of the consumer economy are all, in their different ways, remoulding rural economy and society. This paper looks at one aspect of this multistranded process of agrarian transformation: the role and place of forests and, in particular, non-timber forest products, in rural people's lives and livelihoods. The paper highlights the contradictory and uneven livelihood-eroding/enhancing effects of these transformations. In many upland areas of Laos livelihoods are being squeezed from 'below' by environmental degradation and from 'above' by the operation of government policies and, more generally, by evolving market relations. While market pessimists see market integration as a largely destructive process, the paper highlights the opportunities that market integration can provide through diversification and livelihood reorientation. The challenge is that these opportunities are unequally available and are likely to promote social differentiation. Some households find themselves in a position to embrace new opportunities while others are forced to continue to rely on a declining and degrading forest resource. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.key words: market integration; resource decline; NTFPs; vulnerability; Lao PDR FOREST DEGRADATION, LIVELIHOOD DEGRADATION This paper focuses on the role and place of the forest and, more especially, non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in rural people's livelihoods in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Figure 1). However, the focus of the paper is not on the role of NTFPs in rural livelihoods per se. Rather, I am interested in exploring how market integration and, more widely, globalization (reflected in the Country's integration into the Greater Mekong Subregion) have pressured traditional systems and reworked the place of the forest in rural livelihoods. In particular I wish to elucidate the implications of this for marginal groups in rural society and show how the forest resource has, in a real sense, been wrested from the grasp of local people. The actors in this theatre of development are rural households and commercial intermediaries, and the props and scenery comprise government policies, market forces and, of course, the forests and their fauna.The degradation of the forest resource is central to the narrative of dearth and decline that the paper will outline. But rather than providing a detailed examination of forest degradation itself, the paper will seek to build an understanding of the impact of the process on rural populations and the way in which it narrows and compromises (and therefore degrades) rural livelihoods and in particular the livelihoods of the poor. The paper conceptualizes degradation in a tw...

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