Riding the boom: Rural households' participation and livelihood outcomes associated with teak, banana and cassava crops in Northern Laos

Abstract

In progress Crop booms have become feature of rural households in Laos transition from subsistence to commercial agricultural. A common feature of boom crops is generating many times more income than planting established crops, but they also create social and environmental issues. The complexities and dynamics of farmer decision-making process with respect to crop booms, the livelihood outcomes for participating households and their role in rural change in Laos and have been little studied. This thesis explores this, and the contextual factors of markets and policies, through three cases of crops booms in Northern Laos-Teak, bananas and cassava, considering the forms of smallholder household participation, associated livelihood outcomes and the views and livelihood strategies of rural households involved. Drawing on conceptual frameworks of rural change, sustainable livelihoods, diversified household livelihood strategies and farmer decision-making this study aims understand household decision-making to identify the factors that influence participation in crop booms and the outcomes of this. Field research was conducted in six villages in three Northern Lao Provinces. Mixed research methods were utilised and included semi-structured household interviews with c. 30 households in each village, focus group discussions, participant observations and informal discussions in the case study villages, interviews of key informants and document and literature review. Primary research was supplemented through field studies undertaken in conjunction with activities associated with the broader project in which this study was situated. While this research found similarities with patterns found in other boom crops in Southeast Asia each of the studied boom crops had unique and dynamic key factors that were context-dependent. The emergence of boom crops in Laos occurs mainly in resource frontiers and have been driven variously by factors external to the villages in which they have been adopted as well as factors within villages and within households. While the booms in both cassava and bananas were found to be mainly market-led, teak was a policy-led boom. Although each began with similar external and internal factors, over time these factors changed, with the strongest negative impacts found in the banana case study. The results show that households in the studied villages generally do not have a long-term livelihood horizon, they just riding the boom and following their peers. Boom crops have implications for rural households' livelihoods that are both positive and negative, direct and indirect. The roles of boom crops on rural household livelihoods were found to vary based on household and/or community circumstances. The outcomes suggest processes of both deargrianisation through which households are shifting away from agriculture, and reagrarianisation where households are (re)engaging in agriculture, but through different means. However, not all households have benefited from the crop booms, and the determining factors of this were household characteristics, particularly land and labour resources, and the way in which they participated. The results illustrate that boom crops create household differentiation, but a common outcome of boom crop participation for households in the studied villages was diversified livelihood strategies; in which households became "multifunctional', they increasingly engaged in on- and off-farm activities, a trend observed elsewhere in Laos and Southeast Asia. While rural smallholder households and their livelihoods have become connected to markets and the Lao Government policies for market integration remain a strong, there are lessons that can be drawn from this study with respect to how these policies can be more inclusive of smallholders. Bringing the perspectives and the realities of the rural households into policy design and strategies for agricultural and green economic development is essential. Show more