Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos

TitlePlantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos
Annotated RecordAnnotated
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsKenney-Lazar M
Secondary TitleJournal of Peasant Studies
Volume39
Issue3-4
Pagination1017-1037
Key themesAgriculturalModernization, Dispossession-grabbing, MigrationLabour
Abstract

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production. I examine the concession of 10,000 hectares by the central government of Laos to a Vietnamese corporation for extracting timber and planting rubber in the southern province of Attapeu. This acquisition has excluded farmers from land and resources that constituted their primary sources of (re)production, reconfigured rural property relations, altered the peasant relationship to land and produced new exploitative forms of wage labor.
URLhttps://data.opendevelopmentmekong.net/dataset/plantation-rubber-land-grabbing-and-social-property-transformation-in-southern-laos/resource/2d6e4af9-8301-40af-b60e-02b4d1fd1c91?inner_span=True
Availability

Available for download
Countries

Laos
Document Type

Journal Article

Annotations

Overall relevance: 

This paper gives a well theorised analysis of changing land and labour relations associated with land grabbing in southern Laos. It takes the case of a large Vietnamese company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, which has expanded and diversified rapidly since it was founded in 1993 as a wood processing business. While real estate in HCM City built its capital base, investment in neighbouring countries' resource sector is its main business. The paper looks at a 10000 hectare rubber investment by HAGL in Attapeu Province. On the empirical side, the article is particularly interesting at the macro-scale in showing how the Lao state has been cultivated by the company through support for a national showcase project (SEA Games infrastructure) to gain privileges in the form of land concessions, and at the micro-level to show what this has meant for small scale farmers dispossessed of some but not all of their land. The paper is based on three key conceptual planks: primitive accumulation (Marx), accumulation by dispossession (Harvey), exclusion (Hall, Hirsch and Li), and it uses these to show how change in property and social relations result from land grabbing.

Key Themes: 
  • Agricultural modernisation: key ideas and debates relevant to land tenure security - The main legitimising rationale for the rubber investment is that it brings modernisation in the form of an agro-industrialised model of rural production, use of supposedly under-utilised land, modern forms of labour practice, and revenue to the Lao state. The study shows that all of these legitimising assumptions are ill-founded. The model of rural production is based on transformation of a diverse land and forest production base to a monocropping regime. The land expropriated had previously been vital to farmers' household economy. The labour arrangements are exploitative and impoverishing. And the revenue to the Lao state is paltry.
  • Land dispossession/land grabbing - Farmers in the affected villages have lost a combination of forest land, grazing land and some individual swiddens and paddy land as a result of the rubber investment. The article qualifies 'dispossession' as a partial process that, unlike hydropower and mining projects, allows villagers to remain on their residential plots. In turn, this sets up particular labour relations between the partially dispossessed villagers - who have also lost significant income-earning opportunities with the loss of access to forest products in the area grabbed - and the company.
  • FDI and land access: economic land concessions, contract farming, short term and long term renting - Investment by Hoang Anh Gia Lai takes advantage of a resource (land) that is in short supply in Vietnam and supposedly in greater supply in neighbouring Laos. However, it relies on forcible land acquisition by the state, taking advantage of the legibility afforded by the land and forest allocation program. The FDI arrangements link local investment to favours to the Lao state in the form of HAGL support to a high profile national project, the SEA Games facility in Vientiane. Compensation has been very low, and villagers have had to negotiated on their own without support from local officials.
  • Agrarian change and land: Migration and labour - A key insight of this article is that land grabbing is not simply a 'displacing' phenomenon. In this case, the significant process toward full or partial proletarianisation has not been to push farmers to the cities, but rather to put them in the position of a reserve labour pool on which the company can draw. Nevertheless, there are indications that dispossessed farmers will not necessarily choose - or be chosen - to provide the main source of labour for the rubber plantation, which may seek to bring in Vietnamese labour.
Research basis: 

The study is based on ten months of fieldwork in Attapeu province from October 2009 to August 2010, as part of the author's PhD study. It involves mainly semistructured interviews with community leaders in seven villages, 10 farmers in each of three of these villlages, government officials and company staff.