Concessions and Leases in the Lao PDR

IV - CONCLUSIONS
The “State Land Leases and Concessions Inventory” is based
on data from an official GoL project and allows for capturing,
visualizing and analysing the extent and dimensions of the
land investment phenomenon for the entire Lao PDR. It
includes spatially referenced data and offers a strong baseline
of information essential for the ongoing debate on land
investment issues in the country. This publication presents
the first analysis of land concessions and leases nationwide.
Since investment in land has expanded so significantly
throughout the country, both the GoL and civil society have
adopted a greater level of scrutiny regarding the impacts of
land investment. The publication thus comes at a pivotal
moment in the debate over large-scale land investments in
the Lao PDR.
Investment in land, particularly large-scale foreign direct
investment, has been championed as an effective development
tool by a number of actors. Such a vast expansion of land
investment has brought significant transformations in national
landscapes. These transformations, in turn, engender drastic
socioeconomic and environmental changes, affect food
security and traditional livelihoods and could ultimately
pose challenges to national sovereignty.
Governance structures and institutions have struggled to
keep apace with the expansion in land investments
witnessed in the Lao PDR over the last decade. Five per cent of
the total land area of the Lao DPR has already been granted to
investors for development - nearly ten per cent if concessions
for mining exploration are included. Despite the exclusion of
mining exploration projects, logging concessions, hydropower
projects and contract farming agreements, the analysis
includes a substantial 2,642 land deals, covering 1.1 m ha and
involving approximately 1,900 villages’ land. This 1.1 m
exceeds even the total area of 0.97 m ha under rice cultivation
(MAF, 2012), the main crop grown nationally.
Areas under investment tend to be fairly accessible and are
disproportionately located on forest lands. Foreign investment,
particularly from China, Thailand and Vietnam, by far
outweighs domestic investment in terms of area. This
effectively removes a considerable amount of the country’s
most valuable land from either state or local communities’
use, and could weaken the government’s capacity to address
wider land management issues. The scale of land already
granted therefore calls into question the sovereignty of the
GoL, and the extent of its control over the country’s most
productive lands and resources.
CONCLUSIONS
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