With regard to village and communal land, communal rights represent the blurred middle on acontinuum between private rights and state rights (Sayaraj 2011, p.16). Communal Land Titles arelegally permitted under the Prime Minister’s Decree on Land Titling (No. 88 from 03/06/2006), butthey remain undefined and have only recently been piloted by the NLMA in one district, Sangthong,in connection with an INGO-supported participatory community-based bamboo forest managementproject (Sayalath et al. 2011). Under this communal land titling pilot, 2,107 ha out of a total area of24,889 ha in four pilot villages had been proposed for issuance of temporary (three-year) communalland titling deeds by October 2011. The proposed areas were identified through gender-sensitiveparticipatory action research, including village consultations, mapping and boundary demarcationexercises, and identification of areas for communal natural resource management in conjunction withestablishing village regulations for their use (Bounemany 2011, pp.12-13; LIWG 2011; Sayaraj 2011).A second experiment has taken place under the GIZ-funded Land Management and RegistrationProject 2009-2011, which piloted an approach to registering state, private and communal land in twoprovinces, Luangnamtha and Xayaboury, through a process of participatory land use planning andzoning and district-level systematic land surveying, adjudication and registration (Munelith & vonBehaim 2011). Building on all this work, the NLMA plans to develop a format and detailed technicalconcept for communal titling to clarify who can register Communal Land Titles and what rights theyimply, and then carry out concerted public awareness-raising on the subject. However, it is still a longway from any kind of systematic or national roll-out (Inthavong 2011, pp.40-41; LIWG 2011).Land use planning is itself a high priority of the Lao government. The 7 th NSEDP includes targets ofestablishing detailed land use plans at macro and micro level and land use planning at village levelnation-wide, while the SAD envisages participatory land use planning exercises helping to ensuresustainable land use and land rights for the poorest farmers (Government of Lao PDR 2012a, p.22;MAF 2012a, p.36). The NLMA suggests that land use planning should allow for 2.4 ha of private landper household along with 1.5 ha each of community forest and village production forest – roughly inline with the figures for average household landholdings cited above (Inthavong 2011, pp.26-27). 153.2.3 The Investment ProcessBoth domestic and foreign investment is promoted by the Lao government through a mixture ofmeasures such as generous tax exemptions, low land rental rates, and facilitation through a nationallevel “one-stop service unit”. This latter was set up in the MPI’s Investment Promotion Department(IPD) in October 2011 and is intended to include representatives of all relevant line ministries and bethe initial point of contact for all applications to invest in Laos. However, sectoral ministries such asMAF have long been involved in the investment process and continue to play an important facilitationand approval role for investments in their sectors, and thus in practice investors still face a confusingset of licensing and documentation requirements involving many different parts of national and localgovernment. The confusion surrounding the investment process was clearly acknowledged bygovernment officials during the fieldwork – as one national-level informant put it, “foreign investorsoften ask questions that the one-stop service staff are not always able to provide answers to”.Provinces also have their own IPDs, albeit with a supposed cap on authorization of investments andland concessions up to 150 ha. Once investors receive approval at the provincial level for a landconcession, from the Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Office (PAFO) and the Provincial LandManagement Authority (PLMA), the District Agriculture and Forestry Office (DAFO) has to makethe land available, in conjunction with the District Land Management Authority (DLMA), tell thevillagers, and, in the case of contract farming investments, take care of the enforcement of thecontract. In some cases, the DAFO does not want to be involved in contract farming because it isstuck in the middle and has to enforce deals made at the provincial level that it was not involved in15 See Bourgoin (2012) for a review of approaches to participatory land use planning in Laos.17
negotiating with the investors. During the fieldwork, informants in DAFOs also said that manyinvestors get approval at the provincial level and then go direct to the village level to look for andnegotiate land, which causes bad relationships with the district officials and makes their role moredifficult if investors and villagers get problems later on and come to the DAFO for help. Furthermore,although they were supposed to monitor investments and help solve any such problems betweeninvestors and local people, DAFOs felt constrained in their capacity and resources to do this.Overall responsibility for issuing concessions of rural land for farms and natural resources legally lieswith the NLMA. The NLMA 16 was established in 2004, but before this any government agency could– and did – issue land concessions (Government of Lao PDR 2004b). For agricultural investments,once MPI and MAF approve an investment application it is the NLMA which recommends the landsuitable for the concession and the general location. The provincial and district authorities then takeover the process, as just described above. Box 1, below, presents a summary of the various steps inthe investment process as described by key informants at different levels of government during thefieldwork.16 The NLMA is now under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, created in 2011by merging the WaterResource and Environment Administration (WREA) with parts of NLMA and the Geology Department, as well as theProtection and Conservation Divisions of the Department of Forestry.18
- Page 1 and 2: The Gender and Equity Implications
- Page 3 and 4: Contact for information: martha.oso
- Page 5 and 6: AcknowledgementsThis report was und
- Page 7 and 8: NSAWNational Strategy for the Advan
- Page 9 and 10: The Food and Agriculture Organizati
- Page 11 and 12: 2. Background and Methodology4
- Page 13 and 14: 2.2 MethodologyThe country case stu
- Page 15 and 16: 3. The Case Study8
- Page 17 and 18: and school attendance of boys is mu
- Page 19 and 20: households, but beyond the rhetoric
- Page 21 and 22: A detailed elaboration of how this
- Page 23: ecognized and common in Laos, and a
- Page 27 and 28: p.7; Schoenweger & Üllenberg 2009,
- Page 29 and 30: schemes and often do not - even tho
- Page 31 and 32: the concession areas, but for any l
- Page 33 and 34: one, but we found the terms propose
- Page 35 and 36: Table 1: Statistical Profiles of Bo
- Page 37 and 38: Table 3: Basic Data on Companies In
- Page 39 and 40: Chart 1: Casual Labour Usage on Foo
- Page 41 and 42: The initial prospects of employment
- Page 43 and 44: employees and casual labourers, had
- Page 45 and 46: that the government does not pay en
- Page 47 and 48: practices identified from this case
- Page 49 and 50: 3.6 Alternative Models for Creating
- Page 51 and 52: collateral was needed from her hous
- Page 53 and 54: 4. Conclusions and PolicyRecommenda
- Page 55 and 56: and supported in individual company
- Page 57 and 58: quality and capacity so that they c
- Page 59 and 60: playing field between smallholder f
- Page 61 and 62: Annexes54
- Page 63 and 64: Pakksan District Land Management Au
- Page 65 and 66: Annex 3 - Demographic Distribution
- Page 67 and 68: Chart 5: Sex and Age of Focus Group
- Page 69 and 70: Chart 7: Investment-Related Trainin
- Page 71 and 72: Daley, E. & C. M. Park, 2012, The G
- Page 73 and 74: MoNRE, 2011, MoNRE Cabinet - MoNRE
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