Problems and Challenges in Turning Land into Capital in Lao PDR

Abstract

The large-scale of economic land concessions resulted in significant alternations, landscapes, ecological processes, greatly reduced local access to natural resource, and led to massive changes in the livelihoods of large number of indigenous people as many of them have lost their agricultural and forest land, or conditions of production, which made it difficult to maintain their former semi-subsistence livelihood and to live in the areas. This paper investigates problems and challenges on turning land into capital in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) by conducting qualitative research among people implementing national land use planning and land allocation programmes and local indigenous people affected by large-scale land concession projects. It was found that having no master blueprints on turning land into capital in Lao PDR, delay on land titling and over-concession of land needed were the major problems of turning land into capital. Whereas, the challenges were the farmers’ situation and land use, processes and legal enforcement and compensation references between the owners and the project implementation officials.