Agricultural Land

By Author: Anthony W Bills
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Agricultural Land
Agricultural land is vital to agrarian families and the population increase calls for more cultivable land to feed the people. The increasing commercialization of land as a trade market commodity has led to serious cases of landlessness for the people in Cambodia (Sophal and Acharya 2002). The livelihoods of approximately 85 percent of inhabitants in Cambodia depend on agriculture yet only a few individuals have access to large portions of land (Oxfam Great Britain 2004). This has led to an increase in the number of landless people and cases of land grabbing in addition to numerous land disputes. There is very little land under cultivation due to increased commercialization of land. Most locals sold their land to foreign investors to pay off debts and medical bills leaving them poor and landless. Land transfer and land ownership had strong ethnic effects seeing that landless farmers suffered from income loss and food insecurity and also from the psychological stigma of not being able to labor in their land.
In Laos, majority of ethnic minority groups depended on shifting cultivation, also known ...
... as swidden agriculture (Cohen 2000). Swidden agriculture is practiced by rotating fields of cleared forest land, cultivating it for up to three years then leaving it to regain fertility for up to twelve years before using it again. This type of agriculture has been highly criticized, stating that it leads to high deforestation and has been eliminated for commercial agricultural production by the government of Laos. The government delineated and restricted areas of forest land available for agriculture and issued certificates for land to be used for cultivation. This was the major cause of poverty to the families that depended on shifting agriculture since the upland groups were locked into ecologically unsustainable forms of swidden agriculture where adequate land for cultivation was unavailable (Dove 1983). The swidden families ended up with decreased rice yields and some tried to recover cultivation land by degenerating wildlife and forest resources. Some Hmong refugees from Laos living in china worked in rubber farms in Xishuangbanna during the 1980s before returning to Laos. They are known for their culture of shifting cultivation, but have recently been known to have adapted to relocation and commercial agriculture. Previously, they practiced opium cultivation but have been forced to take up sedentary agricultural production systems as a result of their recent relocation to lower elevation. There are several factors that contribute to the relocation of the upland population, one being the civil wars that lasted a long time and displaced people. The other is the government policy on swidden farming and finally the delineation of village boundaries (Vandergeest 2003). Lyttleton et al. (2004) allude that relocation sometimes is voluntary and not forced as farmers move in search of new opportunities for farming in the lowlands. Farmers who decide to plant rubber have more access to agricultural land and are less poor and so they opt for rubber plantations expecting high income. This is not so advantageous because most of these farmers cannot access basic information on agricultural markets and thus cannot be able to take advantage of the emerging market opportunities.
Land distribution and use
Rights to land use in Lao PDR for agricultural and forest lands are issued to rural villages and local households by the state through the Land and Forest Allocation (LFA) procedures. The private sector is allocated theirs through concession agreement and several cooperative lease arrangements. The relationship between these approaches has raised questions on the security of tenure of locals’ land and the impact of private investment on agro-business on rural households. This is because land previously allocated to rural village and households for food crop farming is now rapidly being overtaken by rubber plantations (Acker 2003). Furthermore, farmers are mostly dissatisfied with the company arrangements since they are normally not consulted in the reallocation of their own land when the contracts are signed between the district authorities and the individual companies. This calls for mechanisms that would enforce contracts on the part of the farmers as well as the companies before a mutual agreement is reached.

Geography of investment
The Greater Mekong Sub region (GMS) was formed to facilitate better regional integration between Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, and the Yunnan province in China. Asymmetrical flows of plants, animals, minerals, people and pathogens have been accelerated in this region that is experiencing ecological integration, demographic and economic disparities. This is mainly due to the development of infrastructure that came as a result of the expansion of regional investment and trade. Cambodia and Lao PDR have become important natural resources providers for timber, rubber, other tree products in addition to agricultural products, minerals and energy for their rapidly economically growing neighbors especially China. Laos and Cambodia have suffered large-scale land concessions to foreign investors from China, Thai, Vietnam and Middle East who have exploited the low costs of labor, politics and ambiguous legal state of the two regions. The two regions are currently trying to formulate workable strategies that will aid agricultural development that will be able to provide food security and economic growth.
Only last August, Cambodia leased land to Kuwait as a deal between the prime ministers of the two countries. Alongside granting large chunks of controversial land concessions to well connect foreign and local companies, the Kuwait and Cambodian governments are negotiating more land concessions for the Middle Eastern oil companies. These foreign and private investors encourage farmers to switch from growing subsistence rice to planting and harvesting rubber for cash in an attempt to boost world trade and international economic activities. The initial rubber plantation in Laos took place in 1996 along the borders with Thailand and China (Chapman 1991). Even though it was not famous during that time, rubber farmers in Laos got experience with it working for farmers in neighboring countries. Many foreign countries flooded into Laos to invest in rubber plantation when the price of rubber increased in 2003. the reforms that lead to the dismantling of the State Farm System in Yunnan Province in China and the opening between china and Laos as a result of the GMS agreement in 1992 is what catalyzed farmers interests in rubber farming. The booming economies in china and India increased the demand for natural and synthetic rubber. In fact, china is expected to consume 30 percent of rubber by 2020. Meanwhile, rubber is becoming popular among rural farmers in Laos. One thing that they find attractive with the cultivation of rubber is that the timber that comes from the rubber trees can be sold long after latex can no longer be tapped. They also benefit from the contract farming with the Chinese companies since these companies provide them with planting materials, technical supervision on the management of rubber and they distribute the latex for them.
As much as rubber is deemed by government officials and international experts to be a means to drive poverty out of the states in these regions, it can also be used as a weapon used by colonial authorities and state governments to manage indigenous populations and their traditional agricultural practices in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, namely the “swidden” culture.

Impacts concession policy
Conflicts are increasing over land as a result of factors like the government programs to consolidate remote rural villages, eliminate slash-and-burn swidden farming practices, and to promote agriculture for commercial purposes (Evrard, and Goudineau 2004, Yokoyama 2004).
Granting land concessions had great impacts on a bigger land area and the communities that live on them.
There are significant negative impacts of monoculture agriculture on the environment especially due to the use of agrochemicals like paraquat used on rubber, as well as other chemical fertilizers (Jonathan and Mathews 2007). When the bio-diversity of an environment is affected, it is the community that suffers the consequences from reduced income and benefits accrued from that land to impoverished livelihoods (James 2006).
As much as some land has been left for other uses and some communities have been compensated for their land, most communities have lost their vital natural resources in large numbers without sufficient compensation. For the most vulnerable groups in these societies, this has meant a destruction of their livelihoods. They came from being a community that made a living from swidden farming, cropping, raising cattle and buffaloes, and gathering fruits and food from the forests to now relying on hired work to buy food (Deininger 2003). Smallholders are mostly affected as their farming and grazing land is being taken away from them. To worsen the situation hedges were built that excluded the commoners and they became outsiders who were not to trespass the land of the wealthy property owners (Blomley 2003). The role of these hedges in the dispossession of the commoner was to act as organic barbed wire protecting the land of the powerful individuals. It was a barrier that if broken could result in violence and riots. New village rules established to fine farmers that graze their animals on other farmers’ land further restricted farmers to grazing in their residential areas.

Social and economic costs to the rural poor
.Hundreds of land given out in concessions was previously being used by local communities and they have lost this land and perhaps also their livelihoods. The land for concession plantation and agriculture is taken from village territories where farmers initially harvested most of their food and source of living. Increased clearing of forest land for rubber cultivation diminish the communal resources like the water supply for paddy fields (Watershed 2004). This implies dire consequences on the local communities as their food production rate decrease and their harvests are reduced significantly.
Some Villagers get very little or no compensation at all for losing rights over the use of their communal land. The poorest people are hardest hit by these land concessions since they find it hard to find alternative land to settle in compared to the rich ones who easily find other places to move to and other means of earning a living (Hanssen 2007). This results in so much inequality between people who were traditionally egalitarian. The luckier ones get poor compensation and are soon left poor since most of the money is used to pay debts and they are left with no other option but to seek employment from the farms of the foreign investors at cheap rates, ending up with very little to spend on themselves.
Besides the negative economical impacts these concessions have on the local community, there is also loss of some sense of their well being due to the fact that these communal land had some social, cultural and religious functions to the communities (Oxfam Great Britain 2004). They consider the land their ancestral homes and they have a history with the land yet these ties are terminated when their rights to the land are taken away from them, deeply affecting them.
Ecotourism companies that benefited from the forest land also suffer since the land is taken away for large scale rubber farming, leaving them with nothing to work with. This also affects the communities that always backed these ecotourism companies or were backed by them who also lose in the process of land concessions. This leaves many people unemployed and others without a source of earning their daily bread submerging them into poverty.
There are several investors in monoculture tree plantations in the Mekong like the foreign investment, cross-border investment, domestic and household investment by small holder farmers on their land. These investments are mostly large scale state land concessions, set aside for growing particularly eucalyptus and rubber.
Land concessions were suspended in May 2008 by the Lao government, but currently some companies still have access to land. There is continued pressure from the side of foreign investor who are keen to encourage the issuance of investment licenses for commercial plantations requiring large areas of land. A legal framework has been set to be followed but it has inconsistent rules that confuse investors, government and locals alike (Wong 2006). Villagers are still not protected against land loss to rich concessionaries. In Cambodia the extent of land concession is much higher, with half of the land being assigned to foreign investors since the global economic boom. There is a likelihood of a strong link between major investors in Cambodia and the senior politicians in the government. Private companies in China, Vietnam and Thailand have an increasing capacity for investment, but due to limited access to land for expansive plantation development in their countries, they are scrambling for land in Laos and Cambodia to invest in. As a result, the local communities in these two regions are losing the only source of their livelihood as their land is given away for commercial growing of rubber and other commercial plantations ignoring the need for subsistence farming for food production.
Economic land concessions should not extend beyond 10,000 ha of land and those that are larger than this should be reduced accordingly, yet the Cambodian government has not taken any action to recover land from powerful companies who own land larger than the permitted size (Fast-wood Plantation Economic Concessions and Local Livelihoods in Cambodia, 2006).
Behind scenes of land concessions, there is great loss of farmland and community food resources as well as grazing land for livestock. The farmers are seriously affected especially with the current rise in food prices, leaving them lagging in apt poverty. They are only left with the option of looking for employment in the plantations whose income is not even sufficient enough to sustain them and their families.
The limitations in communication and politics hinder discussion in Cambodia and Laos while the repression in Burma prevents public opinion. Most civil society leaders have not yet noticed the effects of profit seeking of investors on neighboring countries. They need to open their eyes to the repercussions that the rural communities are facing as a result of these investments and find a way that will aid in the growth of the two economies as well as achieve food security to counter the seasonal hunger experienced by the communities.

Conclusion
The Greater Mekong Sub-region economic cooperation program has fostered the integration of the six economies in the Mekong Basin since the 1980s. The aim was to increase the cross-border investment rates from countries with stronger economic stability neighboring Cambodia and Lao PDR, using the availability of extensive land and cheap labor as incentives to attract them. This was supposed to help the countries in this region, especially Cambodia and Laos to improve their economic growth rate. Care should be taken though to ensure that the local communities do not suffer in the process and that besides economic growth, the government should aim at ensuring food security for the indigenous people of the Mekong region.

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