It’s been about three months now since I first arrived in Vientiane, Laos off of a 36-hour sleeper bus from Kunming, China. The time has flown and I sometimes wonder what I’ve been up to all so far. Yet, a great deal has happened and the real difficulty is how to go about telling the story.
Perhaps I ought to start with how I ended up here in the first place. Similar to when I studied in Miami, this is a question I often ask myself and have difficulty understanding. For both places, it seems that it’s been due to the right opportunity, rather than the lure of the place itself. For both places, however, they have quickly grown on me and given me a simple but strong pleasure in my sense of location. In fact, I have come to relish these opportunities to be in places I might not have otherwise ended up in if it was up to pure choice.
My first engagement with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) was as a one-week side adventure from my 2007 travels in Vietnam, partly so I didn’t have to backtrack in Vietnam, partly to see what’s going on in an unknown land across the border that no one seems to know anything about. While the mystery of the country incited me to go, I soon found myself missing Vietnam and when I had left Laos I didn’t think much about whether I would go back anytime soon..
Yet, while studying abroad in Hong Kong the following year I came across a great research opportunity in Laos. As my primary objective was to gain research experience, the location was less important to me. Through a supervisor’s previous research experience I gained the connections and support to conduct research that I could not have had elsewhere. After I had finished two and a half months of research, I knew I would be heading down an academic path and thus intended to apply for a Fulbright research grant. While I initially wanted to try research in a new place, the deadline was approaching fast making Laos the best choice once again.
So here I am, three months down the road on a Fulbright scholarship to Laos with nothing to complain about. In fact, the experience has amounted to much more than I expected. The Fulbright, like Peace Corps, can be a difficult program as it largely leaves you to your own devices to make the best of what has been given to you; a modest budget, minimum institutional support, and a self-designed project intended to enhance understanding, knowledge exchange, and cultural cross-communication. This is more difficult than it sounds, as can be anything when carried out in a foreign country. The key word is independence and in this aspect having previous experience in Laos has been a huge boon to my work here.
The project I am now conducting is essentially an extension of previous work, which focused on rubber growing contracts between Laotian farming households and Chinese investors (quick clarification: Laotian is the term used when referring to citizens of Lao PDR while Lao is used when referring to ethnic Lao people, i.e., under this system of classification an ethnic Hmong could be termed Laotian not Lao). Although not without its detrimental social impacts, this smallholding model of cash cropping has been heavily promoted by the government as an alternative to a more prominent and more socially disastrous model that is what I am now studying: land concessions.
Although difficult at times to define, a land concession is essentially when the Lao government leases out a large chunk of land (the largest have been up to 50,000 hectares, or approximately 123,548 acres) to a foreign investor for a long period of time (up to 75 years). The uses for such land are quite varied, but most often they are for hydropower (dams), mining, or agro-industry (usually industrial trees such as eucalyptus, jatropha, and rubber). As foreigners are not yet allowed to own land in Laos (this is beginning to change with a new law that is in the process of approval) land rental is the best means of acquiring land for production, and in many ways it doesn’t seem so far from ownership.
You may be wondering, where does all of this land come from and who owns it? This is, in fact, a knotty question and gets to the heart of my research. As Lao PDR is still a communist country (evidenced by the ubiquitous hammer and sickle), all land still technically belongs to the state. However, to leave it there (which is often the case) vastly oversimplifies the complex situation of land tenure and land use in Laos. As the country has engaged in market reforms throughout the last three decades, approaches to land ownership have begun to change. In urban areas, land can now be owned privately. In rural areas (where approximately 80% of the population live and work), a system of land use rights is slowly being put in place. This system theoretically allows for almost all of the same rights as land ownership such, as the right to use land in any way, to rent it, and to sell it. Yet in reality they don’t quite add up to ownership as they are difficult to obtain and just as difficult to hold on to. This is especially apparent when it comes to land concessions, which have been reported by a number of reports and news articles to have given away large amounts of village land, often leaving villagers landless and poorer than before. The intention of my research is to understand how land tenure and land use rights actually play out in the face of land concessions. Hopefully a more nuanced understanding of the role of land tenure can help to find solutions for preventing land loss and mitigating social impacts through compensation and employment security when it does occur.
Well, this sounds like a great project, but what does it mean I’m actually doing day to day? This is another one of those questions I ask myself, especially when I wake up in the morning. In the beginning it was tough to know how exactly to expend my energy every day. After I had taken care of the essentials, such as renting a house and buying a motorbike, I realized I had nowhere to work, and even if I did I wouldn’t know what to do there. Ten months is a long time to conduct a research project so it is essential that what you do is multi-faceted.
Once I got in contact with my local affiliation, the Faculty of Forestry (FoF) at the National University of Laos (NUoL), things started to move along and get easier. They found a desk for me to work at in their research office and I started to get to know the professors and lecturers who were working on various research project, some of which were surprisingly similar to mine and sometimes we even found we had done research in the same villages. Working at FoF gave me a center around which I could orient my activities. Having institutional support has been advantageous in a number of ways. It’s first important to understand that the university in Laos is a government institution and very much an arm of the government (I recently found out that the deans have to go through political ideology training before taking their posts). This point never really dawned on me last summer when I failed to understand how my letter of support from the university allowed me to work so easily with government offices and access villages for interviews. Additionally, the university, and especially FoF, is a well-respected institution within civil society (development) and even private circles.
After establishing my position and workspace I set right to learning as much about the issue as possible. As land concessions were a new issue to me there was plenty for me to read, such as development reports, research papers, newspaper articles, and national laws on land, agriculture, and forestry. Part of my task also included talking to many who have been directly involved with the issue, mostly researchers and NGOs that do work related to land. Through this literature review I have found an incredible amount of information on the topic, much of which seems to go unknown as it is scattered about in many different places. Thus, one of my tasks has been to compile and summarize all of these sources into a type of annotated bibliography to help better inform those doing work related to land concessions, particularly NGOs that belong to an association called the Land Issues Working Group.
This literature review, of course, directly relates to my main project and is very complementary to the fieldwork I will be conducting. In actuality, I have already begun my fieldwork starting with a one-week initial visit a few weeks ago. From my experience last summer I learned that everything you might think you know about a certain topic can change dramatically once you get into the field. While secondary literature provides a great background, it can never delve into the complexities and intricacies of what you experience in the field. Thus, I decided to make this transition a bit easier by conducting a quick trip to my field site, somewhat of a pre-fieldwork trip. I would have liked to stay for longer, but due to issues with acquiring my working visa on time I could not.
However, in such a short time I was still able to accomplish much that has already been incredibly beneficial. The first thing I did was talk to some of the NGOs working in Attapeu (the location of my fieldwork) and surrounding provinces, who have a bit of a different perspective than those stuck in Vientiane. Next, since Attapeu is notorious for being more resistant to outside research than other provinces, it was important to get off on the right foot, which I thought introducing myself early would help to do. It seemed to do the trick as they decided to accept our project. The only hang-up is that we’re required to take a government official with us for every interview. This is actually a regulation throughout the country, but not always enforced depending upon the province and a number of other myriad factors. They also seemed quite open to us considering they gave us all of the data on land concessions in the province we requested and when talking about the issue were very open and direct. Most importantly, it helped me narrow down the exact case study I’ll be looking at and helped me better understand the angle of research I intend to take.
The rest of my time here has been spent carrying out a number of seemingly random activities. The most consistent has been Lao language study. Since I’m too cheap to enroll in language classes (which are already incredibly cheap – it’s amazing what living in a developing country can do to your sense of price!), I’ve been studying privately with friends in exchange for teaching them English, which has seemed to be quite successful as every Lao person keeps telling me Jao wao pasaa Lao geng! (you speak Lao really well!), although they would say the same thing if I could only say Sabaidee (hello). It’s been really enjoyable to be able to converse with the people I live near a little bit more each day. Additionally, it’s already proven useful for my research. I can pick up little pieces of the conversation between my translator and the interviewee, I’ve been able to point out simple words in data sheets, and if I research beforehand can find the accurate translation of technically specific words that will be important for the interview and thus can explain my questions more clearly to my translator.
Applying to graduate school has been another activity taking up my time, although I am fortunately just about finished with that. I’ve kept my list down to my top schools since I’ve decided if I do not get into them nor get the scholarships I’m aiming for I would rather remain here to work for an NGO or development organization rather than go to a school I’m not interested in. Also, I am very, very slowly trying to turn my senior honors thesis into a publishable paper. This has been a bit of a painful process as I am completely new to it and it can be difficult to find supervision. Hopefully it will turn into something more than an exercise in writing and revision. Oh, and of course I can’t forget that I occasionally do my best to help out FoF, since they have been so helpful to me. Mostly this involves writing or editing research funding proposals, and I’m sure at some point reports and papers as well. They would like to have more collaboration but it can be difficult to know exactly how I can work best with them.
Besides all of these activities, I’ve spent my time enjoying the life of Laos. The country’s laid-back attitude has slowly crept up on me. Boh pen yang (no problem or it doesn’t matter) isn’t just a phrase, it’s a way of life. I’m starting to understand how so many foreigners have come here for short-term contracts and eventually made it their home. It may not have the amenities and luxuries of home, the bureaucratic hang-ups might be painfully slow and convoluted, and your skin may turn brown from dust at the end of each day, but Laos must have some of the warmest, friendliest, and smiley-ist people on earth. As one of the only foreigners in my area of town, I often get stared at, but it wasn’t long before I began to feel accepted in my community. In fact it wasn’t long before the women at the market began trying to get me to marry their daughters! (let’s hope for non-socioeconomic reasons). In short, Laos is a wonderful place to be and I’m very much looking forward to the next seven months, if not longer.
I would love to hear from all of you out there. Send me an e-mail at miles.kenney@gmail.com or if you’ve got skype give me a ring at +856 20 781 8517.
All the best,
Miles
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