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The initial prospects of employment creation by the conventional plantations of Lao Banana Companyrapidly changed as the number of workers hired substantially decreased after the first year ofoperation. Lao Banana Company started operating in Laos in 2008 with a 30-year land concession of100 ha, and in 2009 it obtained a second 100 ha land concession for a second plantation. On bothplantations, 150 casual labourers were initially hired from the village where the plantation was based,to clear all the land and plant banana trees. Once this initial work was done, labour requirementsdropped to around 30-35 permanent workers per site. This figure was also this low as the companywas not exporting at the time of the fieldwork due to of a number of technical problems with the cropsthat had forced it to temporarily halt exports and sell on the local market only. At the time of thefieldwork most of the plantation workers were married, but some were young people with little or noeducation who had not yet married. Many were from the minority Lao Soung ethnic group whoseemed to have less and worse quality land than their Lao Loum neighbours, making the prospect ofregular cash income from plantation work potentially a better opportunity for them than alternativessuch as contract farming. The work is also year-round, in contrast to the case of eucalyptus, the othermain plantation investment in the local area at the time of the fieldwork, and therefore likely to bemore beneficial to both permanent workers and casual labourers if the business manages to besustainable.However, although local women and men wanted jobs on the plantation, the company had toovercome initial difficulties as it had not only to train its workers in growing bananas, but also inbeing formally employed as plantation workers – meaning that they had to come to work on time,work for a certain number of hours and leave at a certain time. This was because there was no cultureof this kind of work in the villages nearby the plantations, as most people had never had any kind ofregular formal employment before. One of the biggest problems was that workers would often go offwith no notice to take part in their family’s rice farming, particularly around the time of riceharvesting, leaving the company short of people to harvest the bananas growing ripe on the trees.Although some workers, particularly employees, would hire casual labourers for their rice, mostwanted to take part in rice harvesting themselves because it is a social and culturally significantactivity in Laos that people like to do with their families.Participants in 11 focus groups involved in banana, tobacco, rice and jatropha production were askedabout the impact of the agricultural investment they were involved with on their family’s cash incomelevels; in 12 focus groups they were also asked separately about the impact on their family’s foodsituation. The results are as set out in Charts 2 and 3, next page. Cassava contract farmers wereexcluded from this data set because those taking part in the focus groups had only just signed up totheir contract farming arrangements and thus had yet to harvest their first crops. Nevertheless, womencassava farmers expressed concern that they would be in debt to the company if the harvest was notgood enough in the first year for them to be able to repay the high initial land clearing costs describedin Section 3.3 above; they also expressed concerns (noted above) about the possible impacts on theirfood security in relation to collection of NTFPs.34