The Lao Resettlement Controversy: Poverty, Wilderness, and Ethnicity
Holly High, University of Sydney
The resettlement of Lao highland minorities into sedentary ‘focal’ areas is a key plank of the Government of Laos’ policy platform for poverty reduction and environmental preservation. Resettlement, it is argued, is a win-win solution for both human and environmental sustainability, because it allows these marginal minorities to access hospitals, schools and roads, while at the same time reducing shifting cultivation (perceived as destructive of the forest). While this seductive image of mutually beneficial outcomes has persuaded some international aid donors to lend their support to resettlement programs, a growing number of researchers and aid workers have voiced concerns, arguing that resettlement in fact creates poverty and may not yield the anticipated environmental benefits: a lose-lose situation. Many of these arguments rest on understandings of traditional cultivation and community in the highlands of northern Laos that emphasize harmony (with each other and with nature), sustainability, and independence: a form of ‘original’ affluent society. This paper draws on the explanations of and commentaries on resettlement made by Hmong who have resettled in Vieng Say district, Hua Phan province. Their accounts of engagement with and exclusion from state services and the market significantly complicate the simple oppositions of win/lose that mark the resettlement controversy. It was not resettlement and the subsequent engagement with market and state that these resettled people identified as causing poverty: it was in fact their marginalisation arising from long-term and continuing exclusion from the kinds of health, educational, and economic opportunities that they desired both pre- and post-resettlement.
