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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

mailto:[email protected]

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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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).


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,


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).


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.


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


Figure 1: Map of northern Vietnam and northern Laos showing the two study sites


Vietnam

Laos

Figure 2: Changes in forest cover in Vietnam and Laos (1961-1994)

(index 100 in 1961, sources: FAOSTAT 2004)


Figure 3: Land-use changes in Bac Kan province (Vietnam)


Figure 4: Soil occupancy before and after land allocation in 12 Phongsaly villages (Laos) as of 01/01/2005


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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