Concessions and Leases in the Lao PDR

III - CONTEXT OF INVESTMENT
The granting of concessions and leases in the Lao PDR has
increased at an alarming rate over the last decade. In some
respects, investment has outpaced regulators’ capacity to
track and monitor individual projects. Specific projects have
come under a critical spotlight, for example the Tong Ly rubber
project in Nambak District, Luangprabang Province (Vientiane
Times, 2006a & 2006b; Fujita, 2007; Dwyer, 2007), Peter
Chan’s coconut plantation in Pak Kading, Borikhamxay Province
(Dwyer, 2011), and the VRG rubber plantations in Bachieng,
Champasack Province and Lao Ngam, Saravane Province (Vientiane
Times, 2007a & 2007b; Obien, 2007; Baird, 2010). One
of the most recent cases publicized is that of Olam/Outspan
Bolovans Limited in Champasack Province, a Singaporean
Company with a number of larger coffee plantations said
to have negatively impacted several villages (LIWG, 2012).
These cases have provided important evidence and insights,
showing the concrete impacts of land deals on specific
geographical areas and populations, and highlighting the
complex relationships – and in some cases conflicts of interest
– that exist between different stakeholders. Nonetheless,
systematic analysis on a national scale of the geographic
characteristics of land-intensive investment has been much
harder to come by than isolated case studies. This has been
largely due to the lack of systematically collected data on
investment projects; individual land deals attracted attention
in many cases only by chance after problems gained
significant publicity.
This chapter brings additional variables into the analysis
presented in chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines the relationship
between the inventory data and five key measures of the
“context” within which investment takes place. These
variables range from the geophysical (in the case of the first
variable, elevation) to the socioeconomic (poverty, literacy,
and ethnicity); the other three variables (accessibility, land
use class and forest category) are a complex mix of both
biophysical and land regulatory factors. In examining the
local context within which investment takes place, chapter
3 seeks to provide additional insights into the patterns that
emerged in chapter 2. By better characterizing where investment
takes place, chapter 3 aims to support current debates
about land-intensive investment with concrete statistics
and spatial analysis regarding the “host” villages (villages with
land on which investment projects are located) as well as the
relationship between areas under investment and key
national resources such as infrastructure, cultivated land and
forests.
Chapter 3 thus contributes to an existing set of efforts to
move beyond isolated case studies and make sense of
the wider context of land investment in the Lao PDR. In the
following analysis, the subset of the data containing only
spatially referenced land deals was used, meaning 1,258
investment projects with a total known area of 587,564 ha 29.
This represents slightly under half of the entire area under
investment in the inventory – a fact that has to be carefully
considered when interpreting the results presented.
29 Out of the 1,258 investment projects, 843 are concessions and 415 are leases, with an area of 585,892 ha and 1,672 ha respectively.
CONTEXT OF INVESTMENT
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