by Greg Bryant

RAIN, Vol. XIV, Number 1, Winter 1991

If international commerce suddenly collapsed, the people of Laos would barely notice. The entire population lives scattered about the country in small villages that provide their own food. They are dependent only on themselves, and they live reasonably well.

They farm without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, mainly because they can’t afford them. Their cash income is the lowest in Asia, but this hardly reflects their quality of life. Land is naturally distributed throughout Laos, without interference by the government. Families own all the land they farm on, enough to feed themselves. A healthy barter exchange is carried out among neighboring villages. These communities are independent, run by their inhabitants in a democratic, participatory manner.

Laos is different. Its colonial rulers, France and Thailand, failed to force the Lao to completely commit their lives to producing exports. This is extraordinary -- today, most of the world’s peoples live in countries that operate just like colonies. Typically, the majority is forced to give up farm land to grow food and luxury crops for wealthy nations. Natural and cultural destruction, urban migration, malnutrition and starvation are the consequences. Why is Laos different?

Indochinese countries have long fought for their independence. Major powers covet their strategic location on the ocean trade routes between India and China. However Laos is landlocked, making its neighbors Thailand, Vietnam and Kampuchea much more enticing to predators. The mountains surrounding Laos are nearly impassable, and the Mekong river, where it flows out of Laos, is filled with angry rapids. So the high expense of shipping anything out of the region left ancient patterns of subsistence farming undisturbed by the world market. Nearly undisturbed.

The Western Legacy

Commercial powers tried to gain political control of Laos for centuries, and the Lao suffered heavily from attempts that peaked only a few decades ago. While supporting French colonialism against Vietnam’s war for independence, the United States dropped some 3 million tons of explosives on Laos. This is more per capita than any nation in history has ever received. Tens of thousands of civilians died. The countryside is pocked with bomb craters, and hundreds of villagers still die every year from Honeywell Corporation’s unexploded impact mines, designed specifically with unsuspecting civilians in mind.

This was the ultimate expression of Western Civilization’s frustration with Indochinese independence. After Western imperialism had given it a try, Western socialism was brought in by the natives.
Typically, revolutionary socialist countries in the third world are a great deal better off than they were with capitalism. Compare Cuba, with the healthiest population in Latin America, with neighboring Haiti, where life is dirt cheap. Haiti is what Cuba looked like before it’s revolution. Of course state cooperatives are far from ideal, since worker labor only indirectly satisfies worker needs as the state defines them. But colonial plantations turned into cooperatives are almost always better for the laborer.

But Laos was no abused colony. It maintains a decentralized subsistence agriculture. In contrast, modern Asian communism is based on a centralized, industrialized version of self-sufficiency: the Chinese answer to the Soviet push for internationalist interdependence. Here Mahatma Gandhi’s village democracies meet Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward. The conflict between subsistence and centralized economies could have been immediately disastrous.

However, when the revolutionary leaders of Laos tried central planning, they found it unworkable. They had no money. Without resources they could not centralize a country with 60 different ethnic groups and no infrastructure.

The government helped to get its people back on their feet after the war. They felt that one way to do this was to organize people into cooperatives. But again, these are regressive strategies in a country that already has a cooperative social structure. The social organization of villages works far better than the ideal cooperative, not surprising since cooperatives are just based on poor models of village life constructed by 19th century European anthropologists. Most Lao villages rejected cooperatives and just stuck to what they were doing. If the government had more money, there might have been coercion like under Pol Pot’s or Stalin’s collectivization programs. But the government was impoverished, so collectivization was barely more than a suggestion.

Detailed central planning hasn’t worked in Laos. Nothing new in that. Individual needs and sometimes entire villages were overlooked in plans. The government tended to think that they only needed to learn how to plan better. Aid organizations interacting directly with villages had to fight hard carving out room to work within these plans. Temporarily the government has given up -- they just don’t have the financial resources to pay all the planners they might need.

Capitalism and socialism both failed to gain real control over daily life in Laos. This rejection of any kind of centralized, modern nation state is a hallmark of the Lao alternative. As a result, many structures that Westerners feel are necessary have no place in Laos.

For example, there is no national legal system, and only one prison in the whole country. Typically, judicial systems evolve to support trade and large scale ownership, often for noble classes. The further away people live from what they own, the less legitimate are their claims to ownership, so a rigid system of enforcement becomes a necessity to powerful owners. This never emerged in Laos -- the nobility were not very powerful because the resources of their regions were too limited. In the absence of a formal judiciary, people in a village decide for themselves what ownership means.

Since the socialist government was unsuccessful in centralizing and collectivizing production, it usually acted as a kind of intervillage support league. Independence can be found at many political levels in ways that are unheard of in most countries. For example, provinces now independently negotiate across national borders, and for the most part are required to finance their own services. But real control in the country still lies in the village.

The Natural Economy

To look at the scattered independent villages of Laos today is to see what life without political or economic domination might be like. The biggest worries in a natural economy are not people, but variations in weather. These villages experience almost no crime, and actually define for themselves what is legal. They have a highly developed sense of community and grassroots democracy. They are not subject to price increases. They are not subject to taxes. There are no elites. They work hard, they eat adequately, and they are the easiest people in the world to get along with.

Because they generally have little experience with domination, they are not very good at following orders. Because they’ve never really been squeezed hard by a lord or a merchant, they tend to work at a steady pace, rather than at the ulcerous speeds achieved in other countries.

In a typical village in Laos up to a hundred families live on high ground and farm the surrounding lowlands. No one is in charge -- although sometimes there is a village elder who helps make decisions, and who must work just as hard as everyone else. Their egalitarian lifestyle is not explicitly ideological. It derives from a simple village ethic: the right to survival.

No one’s survival should be put at risk by someone else in the community, since then everyone could suddenly be at risk. This is the primary rule in a village with a natural economy. Older families can sometimes gain influence in a village, but only if the villagers see it as enhancing their chance of survival. In Laos a family’s influence eventually disappears as branches of the family die off or move elsewhere.
Many Westerners wouldn’t find life in Laos idyllic. The Lao don’t read, even though the socialist government has made sure that almost everyone knows how. Their natural economy has never provided the right kinds of leisure and pressure needed to develop reading and writing, the same conditions that often bring domination. In Thailand, China and Vietnam even very poor people read a great deal, reflecting the differences between history of those countries and that of Laos.

As a substitute for literacy the Lao can, when motivated, learn extremely fast just by watching. In a subsistence culture this is one way to pass on skills -- something of a lost art in Western Civilization.
But the Lao also don’t read because there is nothing to read, certainly nothing anyone finds important. This is unfortunate since most of the world’s subsistence cultures have been destroyed without knowing what was coming. The Lao are rather isolated, so they can’t work together with others who would support them against domination. Literacy is an important step towards developing a kind of internationalist league of locally self-sufficient towns.

Practical illiteracy isn’t the only shortcoming of the Lao. In agriculture they aren’t terribly efficient -- their population has stayed low so they scrape by with the most primitive kind of rice paddy farming. They don’t compost, weed or garden. They plant no forests, and the gravity powered irrigation systems they’ve been using forever aren’t maintained very well. Again, their society has never been sufficiently desperate, leisurely or stratified to install some of these simple good ideas.

They need these ideas because the world will not stay away from Laos forever. Recent events make this even more clear. If their culture is to survive they need to strengthen what they do well. They need to create a natural economy that can deal with encroachment, and whose awareness stretches beyond local issues. A few aid workers from some small Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) are trying to work with the Lao to achieve just this.

Helping Those Who Already Know How to Help Themselves

Teaching Lao farmers how to farm is like teaching a crocodile how to swim. They might do better, but what they do now has worked for a very long time.

What they are doing now is certainly better than what banks and governments in the developed world want them to do. Really big aid organizations help these interests to destroy places like Laos. Luckily, most of the big aid organizations, and world lending institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have not been too active in Laos. Those groups tend to build enormous dams and gasoline powered irrigation systems that subsistence farmers have no idea how to maintain, or which create electricity that no one can use. Big projects tend to waste money, foster corruption, and disrupt lifestyles directly and indirectly by encouraging sheer consumerism.

A more reasonable approach is to ask the villagers what improvements they want to see, and to keep the projects small out of respect for the scale of native technologies. One Australian group is helping to repair existing, traditional gravity fed water systems. These are tiny dams high in the hills that catch rain or springwater, which then runs down flumes and ditches into rice paddies. The Australian project also helps to repair the village social groups that keep these irrigation systems in working order.

It’s very difficult to get a village to cooperate well during a water shortage. They can’t take their frustrations out on the sky, so they take them out on each other instead. Under this kind of social pressure village organizations can’t easily be formed. This is very different from organizing against governments or corporations during hard times. That’s easy, since victims can direct their frustration towards people responsible for their condition.

So the Australian project encourages villages to set up Water Groups when there is plenty of water and everyone is getting along. The village management of irrigation then runs more smoothly through the dry season. The villagers write down their own rules and post them, promoting cooperation and literacy at the same time.

Some might cringe at introducing rules into this happy social setting, but they are needed for fairness. The Lao respect each other’s right to survive, but when times are tough people will sometimes be greedy and try to get more than their share of water, even if they don’t need it. Their paddy dikes can be overflowing but they will still take more, and make life difficult for those downstream. If someone’s right to survive is immediately threatened, the villagers will normally do something about this. But sometimes no one will confront the offender since the damage doesn’t show up until later, at harvest time, when someone might come close to starvation as a result. With rules and sanctions agreed upon, and simple ways of measuring water flow, the problems can be dealt with immediately; in Lao villages this is usually done by spreading bad gossip about the offender.

Respect for survival evidently makes most crime disappear. Even in villages where there are mentally disturbed ex-refugees or people maimed by bombs, violent crime is just not to be found. When everyone is trying to eke out a living there is no room for luxuries like violence.

Or elitism. There is little access to world trade, and there is not enough land in Laos to support a strong land-owning class. Any family trying to run a tough feudal dynasty wouldn’t eat very well, especially in the highlands.

The American Friends Services Committee (AFSC) has an aid program that specifically targets a certain kind of elitism -- patriarchy or male dominated hierarchy. This is a problem with only a few ethnic groups in Laos. The women’s project tries to assist villages by getting the women to speak up and help decide the direction of change in their villages.

Take for example certain upland H’Mong villages. Unlike the lowland ethnic Lao, the H’mong in some parts of Laos are nearly pastoralists -- raising livestock and engaging in a level of trade that seriously increases their dependence on economic centers. Much of this began when they were required by French colonialists to increase opium production, creating commercial monopolies that the French and later the United States took over. The H’Mong also suffered severe shocks as a minority used by U.S. counterinsurgency activities in recent decades. All this has helped to create rough tribes that keep their women bound to severe hardship.

The AFSC Women’s Project was only able to make headway into these hardened groups by bluntly pointing out that the tribe would get no aid if the women weren’t involved. If this seems like manipulative intervention, compare it to the type of intervention that caused these problems in the first place.

The women’s project was initiated in part because it could rely on the women’s union -- of one of the more relevant of the socialist organizations in Laos. This is a national group with membership all the way down to the village level, meant to deal with disaster relief. The AFSC found these women to be very interested in helping to improve their village in good times as well. In order to understand their problems properly when the women raised them, the aid workers watched village life very carefully for at least 24 hours, something big aid organizations would rarely do. The AFSC then worked with small projects, initiated by the women, meant to reduce their daily labor.

Incidentally, the women’s union has helped some Lao women to see the great strength in their subsistence villages. It sponsored a group of Laotian women on a visit to the Philippines, and later invited a Philippines women’s group to Laos. The Lao women were shocked and overwhelmed at the problems in the Philippines -- almost no one has land and everyone is forced to work on plantations or migrate to cities, to prostitute themselves or work in factories for pennies a day. The Philippine women were equally confused when they came to Laos. They couldn’t believe that everyone was able to feed themselves, have their own land and keep a roof over their heads. They wanted to see the homeless and the urban poor. But Laos doesn’t even have any cities to speak of -- let alone urban poor.

Laos cannot become another Philippines -- the varied geography and the expense of shipping out goods will always be constraints on change. But it could return to the way things were before 1975.

The old government was corrupt and completely supported by foreign aid. When this aid was withdrawn, the new government had no choice but to try to create self-sufficiency in food again in the section of lowland Laos that had become dependent. They passed a law preventing any farmers from using pesticides or petrochemical fertilizers so that the crop yields wouldn’t depend on expensive foreign oil. In a few years the village lifestyle returned to these areas.

To get Laos on their political side, the capitalist nations have demonstrated that they are willing to destroy everything distinctive and independent about Laos. At the moment they have good relations with Laos -- but they are using these to divide the politicians in the country and give advantage to those they favor. At worst, a coalition of centralizing, collectivizing, export-minded politicians will be supported by western aid. Laos is special in that it hasn’t many resources to exploit. As long as it is on the political side of the West it will be allowed exploit itself by experimenting with centralization.

Under these conditions, how can Lao peasants develop their natural strengths and their international awareness further, to improve their lives and to serve as a solid model of an alternative future?

A Plan to Strengthen a Natural Economy

One trend that should certainly be encouraged is the building of small, indigenous research centers. In the Laos capital of Vientiane there is a group of native technicians that designs, builds and brings to the countryside small-scale technologies specially suited to the requests of villagers. This group asks the smaller NGO’s to give them projects, such as workable water powered pumps, and the organizations always get better results than when they import equipment. Native technicians can better design and build in consideration of the details of Laos, and they can better train their fellow Lao.

The ideal is to encourage the development of local technics from local materials. This opens up the discussion in villages as to what is efficient and what isn’t, and keeps products independent from the global market so that communities can barter for them. Villages then distribute techniques among themselves through visits and travelling Buddhist festivals. This can already be seen at work in the speed that varieties of introduced vegetables have been moving from community to community.

Encouraging native technical competence helps the Lao to feel less shy about arguing with foreign aid workers and developers. They can explain how their native technologies are not as destructive as those created in the west to serve the interests of big money.

The Lao government doesn’t generally believe that raising technical competence is worthwhile. Like most governments they have a paternalistic attitude towards their people, and they refuse to accept that a Laotian can become expert in anything. One fellow, a top-notch Lao agronomist, has developed simple water collection systems and has found a water plant, the Azola, that doubles the nitrogen content of rice paddies. He was for years unable to advise aid projects until the government finally gave him credentials as a "foreign expert", implying that there are no native ones. The AFSC tries to deal directly with this problem by picking project assistants who are Lao. Their meagre funds go farther when they leave behind skilled natives. Very small aid organizations have to work themselves out of a job to be effective.

Another positive development is the Native Medicines Project. Poor health is one of country’s biggest problems, and medicines are always in short supply. But the Lao know much about the properties of indigenous plants that could make villages self-reliant in medicines. The project identifies native cures, after prying the secrets out of tribal doctors. They find the active ingredients, hold clinical trials to determine which ones are effective, and then passes this information back to all the villages.

Similarly, the Lao can make artificial limbs and crutches out of materials they can grow themselves, which a French project is helping them do. Once a village knows how to do this so that the recipient is comfortable, that person can become a productive member of the community again.

But the Lao must gain the spare time to support all these activities. Therefore, the first support must be for those changes that reduce labor. This is where the AFSC women’s project has done very well, providing: contraception, a much sought after labor saving technology; nursery pens or crèches, so women don’t have to carry the kids everywhere, and so the older children can go to school rather than guard their siblings; better rice pounding technology; and catchment jars so villagers don’t have to travel miles for water.

Then there are longer term labor saving ideas -- gardens to reduce foraging time; planting fast growing trees so one day out of four isn’t spent adventuring for firewood; composting, to increase food yields; planting a diversity of crops to provide better nourishment; planting luxury crops on otherwise poor soil, which they might sell for cash; and education.

Education is difficult to promote anywhere. But the Lao curriculum of literacy, numeracy, health information and revolutionary politics particularly strikes many villagers as irrelevant. There are ways of developing relevance, though: get farmers to write down what they know and make this a part of the local children’s curriculum, part of what good agricultural extension workers should do; entice people to learn numerical skills so they can plan their barter arrangements with the next village; get villagers to write contracts for each other regarding issues like water distribution; getting them to create their own teachers rather than just giving them a poorly trained one.

Buddhists priests have played some role in Lao education, adding relevance for some. Priests are registered with the state, so the kind of education they are involved with is of the top-down kind. This is the state-directed education that isn’t working both because of the detached curriculum and the lack of money for teaching. This is why the encouragement of local self-education is so crucial -- it may be the only method that works.

Eventually, peasant farmers must learn something about the unusually resilient economic model they represent, and how to recognize counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary techniques used by other economies. This may seem a long way off, but without such understanding there could be yet another bloody episode within a few decades.

To develop this kind of self-education, a new level of self-sufficiency is needed: the emergence of native, independent and ecological technologies. These are both cheap and maintain decentralization.

Black dyes now sometimes used for clothing can be used for black boards and writing ink. Reeds can be used as pens. Traditional palm leaf and bamboo paper can be grown according to need in each village, eliminating paper import costs. Small, locally designed planing mills can take the heavy labor out of creating flat wooden blackboards. Small chalk stick compacting presses are needed so teachers can have a ready supply from native chalk. Hardwood trees must be planted to be harvested as strong materials for making machines like chalk presses and planing mills.

These are just the type of technologies needed to promote writing. Developing them will give villagers more of a feeling that the system of education belongs to them. They must feel it is worth putting energy into since the education can’t be totally supported from the outside -- there isn’t the money for this.

Many of these technologies can be developed at the provincial level by Lao research and distribution centers like the one in Vientiane mentioned above. Much of this, and much else, could be developed with the right kind of extraordinarily well designed, integrated aid project.

But there are many constraints on this approach. There are only so many Lao technicians and so many Lao teachers who can promote this kind of work, and of course the big money isn’t going into this level of integration. More skilled labor would come if the program developed relevance to people’s lives. Eventually. But resolving the shortage of labor by creating more skilled Lao workers is a painfully slow process, especially when done ecologically for subsistence cultures.

Unfortunately, if done properly, the pace of this kind of plan is perhaps too slow. It will be useless if the villages can’t maintain political self-rule. And these natural technologies often don’t develop soon enough to keep people from becoming addicted to advanced world-market technologies. For example, the women’s project tried to introduce bicycle powered rice mills, but the women insisted on small gasoline powered ones they had seen in larger towns. Another project tried to create sturdier roofs from cement laced with vegetable fibers. Now the price of both gasoline and cement have soared and the villagers are feeling the pressure. Luckily, the Lao are further along than almost anyone in the world in escaping from these dependencies.

The current government originally had a number of self-reliant ideals, such as making the country self-sufficient in agriculture. Their literacy programs and their development of international awareness were also mostly in the right direction. Also, they were trying to make the area around Vientiane self-reliant in textiles, a shuttle-loom in every province. But trade opened up before this was developed; everyone has bought the new, inexpensive market goods instead. Goods produced in places like the Philippines.

But the government’s obsession with centralization kept it from seeing the advantages of a more robust self-reliance at the village level, such as village self-education mentioned above. The insensitivity of the larger aid projects also lent credibility and money to the dismantling of natural economies. The government wanted to eventually destroy subsistence because it was viewed as inefficient. Now, the world is very quickly shaping the Lao government into one that will make it even harder to maintain local self-sufficiency.

Recipe for Demolition:
Social Planners and Multinational Finance

Deeply integrated, sustainable aid projects are almost nonexistent in Laos. For example, the World Bank loaned Laos the money to create an expensive dam to produce electricity to sell to Thailand.

Money earned from the dam now pays mostly the interest on the loan. In addition to building the dam, the World Bank project also had to relocate villages in the way of progress and set up their subsistence agriculture again. The relocation was done on a tiny budget -- which is probably why it worked pretty well. Of course, the World Bank would never consider doing efficient, small scale work like this with the money it allocated for the dam itself. The Bank’s role is to encourage national dependence on global finance.

Governments that go into development debt are so financially strapped that they pull back resources from ministries like education and health. These are then heavily funded and influenced by western aid agencies, also usually to the benefit of opportunists in the government.

Laos had a very idealistic leadership until just a few years ago. They had some ideas that were destructive in Laos, such as agricultural cooperatives. But the revolutionary leaders genuinely wanted to help their people, and after the free world was done with them in 1975, the Lao needed much help. Their models were not so good, but their hearts were in the right place.

Things have changed in the past three years with the coming of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic’s (Lao PDR) version of glasnost. Politicians from the old, pre-1975 leadership have gradually come back to Laos, and with western money are quietly buying their way back into power. Every one of the big aid programs or loans seems to end up fostering opportunism and shifting concern away from the people’s needs.

In Vientiane the United States has maintained an embassy, but they never offered reparations or aid to civilians they had bombed. The dealings with Laos have been invariably insensitive. In a country struggling to keep people alive, with a devastated countryside, with anti-personnel mines killing villagers, with a hostile government in Thailand, the U.S. embassy wanted the Lao government to spend precious resources locating the bodies of U.S. pilots who had been shot down during the war. This kind of myopic racism characterized much of the U.S. contact with Laos after 1975.

A typical bit of cold war propaganda was the claim by the U.S. that some form of biological or chemical genocide was being practiced by the Lao PDR against some highland minorities. The "Yellow Rain" episode was a typical CIA operation -- fake reports, supposed victims on the CIA payroll, press releases announcing hundreds of deaths by yellow mist. Years later, chemists, biologists, anthropologists and aid workers confirm that the phenomenon is harmless bee feces dropped regularly by swarms into the mountain forests. All the upland villagers knew this, but no one from the mainstream press had ever asked them about it.

Native agents who helped the CIA with the Yellow Rain propaganda also helped them during the war by harvesting opium from the Golden Triangle, a region at the intersection of Laos, Burma and Thailand. A new Hollywood movie, "Air America", recognizes for the first time in popular culture the US involvement in the Indochinese opium trade. The opium shipments were directed by the same US covert operations group that later ran the Iran-contra operation, where they reaped some quick profits from the Latin American cocaine trade.

Western proxies are now using this opium money to fight the Lao PDR. An odd situation: the US is fighting Laos at the same time it maintains good relations with the country. The press, when it stumbles upon this kind of politics, typically sees a contradiction. But really it is a common strategy for making a country dependent. Loan a country money to fight against proxy forces, pushing the government further into western debt. This favors politicians inside the country who are unconcerned about western exploitation.

Recently, congress appropriated money to fight opium traffic in Laos, but the operation is a scam at the expense of Lao peasants and US taxpayers. The $8.7 million over 6 years is supposed to help the people of an extremely remote, self-sufficient region to grow crops that substitute for opium. But this region isn’t actually engaged in drug traffic. The money will do great harm, damaging agricultural patterns in the area with some token aid effort, and putting cash in the pockets of opportunists in Vientiane.

Remote villages are often damaged by aid projects, but the whole country is strained by debt payments. There are no exports to speak of, so the government cuts down forests or dams the Mekong to generate electricity to sell to Thailand. As the debt accumulates it is easier to pull the government in the political directions the foreign interests prefer: the Lao PDR now doesn’t even call itself socialist. Already good provincial representatives are resigning as the government retreats from humane independence towards corrupt dependence.

A sure sign of trouble: the Peace Corps will be going to Laos soon. This is a preliminary gesture to the opening of relations with the US, after which will follow USAID programs like the ones that nearly annihilated Lao independence before. The Lao peasants are becoming aware of this and are very angry -- they are still recovering from the last time.

What can be done?

U.S. citizens can write to Congress to stop wasteful aid to Laos. The country cannot absorb it. Additionally, small scale aid workers are now having a harder time starting sustainable projects with a government that prefers siphoning off money from big aid projects.

Write to congress to prosecute those trying to pressure Laos with opium money laundered in the United States.

Don’t promote tourism to Laos! They are not anthropological curiosities -- they are people who have managed to be neither exploited nor collectivized by centralized governments. Tourism destroys their independence as surely as any export.

Aid workers from NGO’s are networking like mad to promote small-scale integrated projects. These are the only kind that work. They need funding. Send money to the NGO’s listed below, earmarked for small, appropriate, deeply integrated projects in Laos.