Over the past decade, transnational investors have acquired vast amounts of fertile and resource-rich land
across the Global South for various types of investment projects such as mineral extraction, agricultural
and forestry plantations, livestock breeding, and infrastructure or tourism projects (Cotula et al. 2009,
World Bank 2011), estimated in total to be at least 71 million hectares (ha) globally, equal to twice the
size of Germany (Anseeuw et al. 2012). While such land deals have the potential to initiate economic
development in rural areas, create employment, and provide needed revenue to developing country
governments, a wide range of case studies (Baka 2011, Fortin 2011, Amanor 2012, Feldman and Geisler
2012) and global comparative research projects (Anseeuw et al. 2012, German 2012) have found that
such investments also come with negative socio-economic and environmental impacts at the local level,
such as land and resource dispossession of smallholders with insufficient compensation, lack of
participation in decision-making by those impacted, low-wage and infrequent employment in the resource
projects, and destruction of environmental resources, particularly forests. Despite the importance of these
findings, as case studies they are oftentimes not comprehensive enough to be used as a basis for nationallevel regulatory and policy changes. Many developing countries lack an organized and comprehensive
database on the most basic elements of land deals, such as the amount of land allocated to and cleared by
investors. In this paper, we examine the extent and impacts of large-scale land acquisitions in the Lao
People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR or Laos) based on an initial national land investment inventory
that is to be used as a basis for policy decision-making.
In 1986, the Government of Laos (GoL) began increasingly opening the country’s resource landscape to
foreign investment projects through long-term leases of “state land”, or state land concessions. 1 Since
2000, 1.1 million ha of land have been conceded to investors for agricultural, forestry plantation, mining,
and infrastructure projects, almost five percent of the total national land area (Schoenweger et al. 2012).
This strategy of what the government has termed “Turning Land into Capital” is aimed at generating
economic growth by increasing the value of the country’s natural resources. However, a number of case
studies have shown how resource investment projects have displaced subsistence resource users from land
essential to their livelihoods, while compensation and available employment are often unsatisfactory for
the impacted farmers (Obein 2007, NLMA et al. 2009, Barney 2011, Kenney-Lazar 2012). The GoL has
also recognized the social and environmental problems resulting from large-scale land investments and as
a result has issued a moratorium on all new concessions for eucalyptus and rubber plantations and mining
projects until the end of 2015 (Vientiane Times 2012). A Prime Ministerial Notification No. 13 was
issued that calls for cross-sector analysis by multiple ministries concerning the state and impacts of land
concessions to inform policy changes, as well as identifying suitable locations for new projects once the
moratorium is lifted (GoL 2012).
One government institution carrying work that addresses the Prime Ministerial Notification is the Natural
Resources and Environment Information Center (NREIC) of the Ministry of Natural Resources and
Environment (MoNRE), which has initiated the State Land Leases and Land Concessions Information
System (SLLCI-S) project to update and improve the state of spatial data on land concessions and assess
the impacts and quality of investment projects. 2 The research results, as well as an improved system of
data management and harmonization across ministries, will be presented to the Prime Minister’s office to
1
According to the Land Law (GoL 2003) all land within the Lao PDR is under the ownership of the national
government. However, it is also legally recognized that citizens with legal land title are also land owners (GoL
2008). Thus, state land concessions may include land that is used or owned by Laotian citizens.
2
The project is being carried out with financial and technical support from the Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation (SDC), the Center for Development and Environment (CDE) from the University of Bern, Switzerland,
and the German Society for International Cooperation (GiZ).
1
inform land concessions policy decision-making at the end of 2015. In this paper we discuss both the
development of the methodologies used to account for and evaluate land investments as well as the results
of these approaches from the pilot phase of the project in two districts—Viengphoukha of Luang Namtha
province, northern Laos and Phin district of Savannakhet province, southern Laos—where spatial and
quality of investment data has been collected and analyzed on five investors in the plantation and mining
sectors. We argue that this work is innovative globally in two ways: 1) It aims to improve the collection
and management of land investment data by government institutions across different ministries within a
developing country and to improve the ability of such institutions to work together to investigate the
quality of approved investments for the purposes of increasing regulatory capacity. 2) The project has an
explicit spatial component in the database which will allow for a seamless integration of social, economic,
and environmental data related to quality of investment. This approach has the potential to serve as a
model for similar projects in other developing countries to improve the extent and quality of data on
large-scale investments for the purpose of improved policy decision-making and land governance.
References
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