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RECLAIMING THE LAND-- Women planting eucalyptus leave strips of natural habitat on either side of a stream to help preserve biodiversity around plantations
Small farmers in rural areas of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) are benefiting from new employment opportunities under an ADB-supported project that protects the natural forest, involves local villagers in decision making, and develops a promising new sector in the Lao economy.
Over the past decade, the Lao PDR Government has pursued a natural resource policy promoting reforestation and tree plantations. Reforestation is required under regulations used to administer forestry concessions.
The Government’s Forestland Allocation Program has made significant progress in allocating vacant, unused, underused, and other wastelands in most regions of the country.
Because plantations are all being established on degraded land—not on natural forest areas—plantation development in the Lao PDR is unlikely to have the adverse environmental consequences associated with establishing plantations witnessed in other Asian countries.
LUCRATIVE BY-PRODUCT--Charcoal made from waste wood in Phonhong District is export bound
The plantation sector in the Lao PDR provides considerable scope for delivering economic, social, and environmental benefits. While it remains in its early stages of development, this sector has demonstrated the ability to attract private investment in both plantations and processing.
ADB has supported the Government’s efforts with an $11.2 million loan project and related technical assistance grants. The Industrial Tree Plantation Project has successfully established fast-growing tree plantations on more than 9,000 hectares of degraded forestland; produced wood for fuel, construction, and industrial uses; and established a policy framework for developing sustainable industrial tree plantations.
The project has built a technical base to support commercial tree plantation development and provided support for private sector plantations and processing activities. It also established participatory processes for identifying land for plantation development, incorporating comprehensive socioeconomic analysis, and training for farmers in plantation management techniques.
MORE THAN TREES--Local communities place a premium on nontimber forest products, such as the edible fungus the woman is gathering from an acacia plantation (above); a close-up of the fungus (below)
The Department of Forestry is responsible for implementing the Forestland Allocation Program, which it is doing in a participatory manner. Forestland allocation maps are posted in the center of many villages and are readily available to the public. Under the program, all land is allocated to villages for management with the technical assistance of district and provincial forestry technicians.
Tree-planting firms negotiate with villagers for the use of forestlands. Commons, swiddens, grazing land, and community forests are protected by the villagers themselves, who must give their written consent to any commercial use.
The project provides credit to smallholders—both individuals and groups—and to private companies. Client surveys reveal that credit provided from the project has reached 359 villages and over 1,800 households. Most of the Lao population, especially those in remote areas, rely heavily on the forest for their subsistence and cash income.
The project improves livelihoods by diversifying the source of income of small farmers and increasing income by generating labor demand, and providing other income-earning opportunities associated with goods and services required by commercial plantation investors. In addition, the project creates opportunities for growing exports of the Lao PDR, generating much-needed hard currency for one of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries.
The project includes the services of an environmental expert who visits a selection of plantations each year to review establishment practices, and ensures that adverse environmental impacts are minimized and that planting follows strict environmental guidelines.
Green corridors along stream banks and runoff gullies are left under natural vegetation. Herbicides are not used; rather, a biodegradable product called glyphosate is applied to control weeds.
Once in the soil, glyphosate binds to clay particles and becomes inactive, with a half-life of 3–30 days. Larger plantations include in their layouts buffer zones and firebreaks, which contribute to the overall diversity of habitat around plantations. The carefully structured plantations also take pressure off natural forest logging.
The future development of the plantation sector in the Lao PDR will depend on the expansion of private sector investment. In addition, new markets for plantation products will have to be identified and the sector must reach internationally competitive benchmarks. Although on a small scale, existing wood processors are already developing domestic and export markets for plantation wood products such as furniture, parquet flooring, and cutting boards.
There are potential opportunities for exporting sawn timber to countries that currently import significant volumes of timber from tropical forests, including the People’s Republic of China and Thailand. But this will require large investment in plantation processing as the equipment required to process fast-growing plantation trees is different from that generally used for processing natural forest timbers. There also appears to be scope for exporting pulpwood to Japan.
As for competitiveness, an analysis of limited data on the growing costs and typical growth rates for the Lao PDR suggests that both of these key variables are within internationally competitive benchmarks. Given these developments, the industrial plantation sector has considerable potential to contribute to economic and social development.
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