DOCUMENT RESUME ED 270 509 UD 024 855 AUTHOR ... - ERIC

THE HMONG IN LAOS: ECONOMIC FACTORS 29I would suggest, therefore, the likelihood that theswidden use of mountain sides for opium cultivation(which progressively reduces soil fertility until landceases to be productive) created a resources/populationimbalance in certain Hmong areas of Laos throughout thefirst half of the twentieth century and that the Hmongresponded to that situation in exactly the same way theyhad responded to the same problem in China: by moving aproportion of the populationnot all of the populationinto a situation of resource plenty.Thus, it can be argued that two historical precedentsof Hmong economic migration across national frontierspreaated the beginnings of the Laotian civil war inthe 1950s.The thirty-year-long civil war was undoubtedly responsiblefor removing further portions of land in Hmongareas of Laos from the possibility of exploitation. Manymountain areas, previously open to cultivation, werestripped of vegetation by the effects of bombing and chemicals.During the fighting of the 1960s and early 1970s,the Hmong tended to group in certain safe villages, indisplaced person camps in the lowlands and in the "secretarmy" mountain town of Long Cheng, which had been establishedas early as 1961. Such large population groupingscould not hope to supply all subsistence needs by traditionalswidden cultivation, and a great many Hmong familiescame to rely increasingly on food drops by aircraft,handouts in the population centres or the soldier's payearned by adult males. Most estimates of the number ofHmong on some form of "welfare" during this period totalover one hundred thousand.In addition to these one hundred thousand we shouldremember that there were also Hmong in uniform on thePathet Lao side. They earned little money but it is trueto say that they also gained at least part of their basicsubsistence by nonagricultural means.The picture of Hmong areas of Laos in 1975 is one inwhich the pinch of resource scarcity had long promoted asteady movement of Hmong migrants into Thailand; thissituation of resource scarcity was compounded by a civilwar which had many of the effects of the industrial revolutionin Europe, driving farmers from their lands whilst41