Animal husbandry improves lives of Xieng Khuang villagers
Nonghet district is a mountainous frontier area bordering Vietnam which lies in the remote north-east of Xieng Khuang province and is populated by a variety of ethnic groups.
Local officials are working to boost agricultural production in the area to improve the livelihoods of impoverished villages.
Remote villages in Xieng Khuang still lack basic infrastructure so development remains a challenge.
The people of Nonghet have been engaged in subsistence farming for hundreds of years, and they remain largely dependent on traditional methods of agriculture to this day.
Traditional farming techniques and a lack of modern technology means that their agricultural yields are often poor, which gives officials and development workers scope to improve the productivity of their agricultural plots by introducing new farming m ethods.
District Deputy Governor Mr Khampha Thammavong said this week that local communities have worked the land for many centuries but antiquated farming techniques mean they are unable to increase the quality and quantity of their crop yields. In addition, the legacy of unexploded ordnance remains a significant issue in the district.
Up land areas are typified by infertile acid soils, savannah grasslands and pine forests. A 2004 study found that only about five percent of the total land area in upland Xieng Khuang is cultivated, and rice paddies comprise 80 percent of the cultivation area. Whilst rice remains the dominant crop, the vast proportion of household income is generated by livestock grazing and animal husbandry enterprises.
Particularly in remote areas though, farming systems are still predominantly based on food security and self-sufficiency, and rice crops remain dominant for this reason. Rice crop residues (bran and broken rice) are used to feed pigs and poultry; cattle and buffalo are raised on natural grasslands and fed with rice straw after the harvest.
Manure is collected to fertilise the paddy fields. Surplus rice is sold and the proceeds used to purchase items such as a television, motorcycle, or sewing machine. The money may also be reinvested into farm equipment such as a cultivator, husking machine, tractor or threshing machine.
However, due to the nature of the mountainous terrain, land suitable for rice farming is limited and developing new cultivation areas is expensive and difficult.
Mr Khampha said the local community has only 320 hectares of rice fields, and it is not enough to produce a sufficient rice crop so local officials ar e encouraging villagers to plant other crops instead. He said farmers and market gardeners in Nonghet district have had success with the commercial cultivation of corn, and a variety of vegetables and small crops.
But the expansion of commercial cultivation areas is hampered by the ever present reality of unexploded cluster munitions, making clearing new areas for farming slow and dangerous work.
UXO Lao is one organisation working in Xieng Khuang province to clear the land of this deadly menace. It is estimated that a total of 1,685,000 hectares of land in the province are contaminated with unexploded munitions, according to UXO Lao. At least 500 hectares of land are cleared each year, of which agricultural land accounts for 90 percent. All seven districts in the province remain affected by UXO.
Laos remains the most heavily bombed country in the worl d per capita, after the country was saturation bombed by US warplanes between 1964 and 1973, when more than 2 million tonnes of ordnance rained down on the country. UXO is found in villages, near or beneath houses, schools and hospitals, in districts and provincial towns, rice fields and gardens, and in mountains and valleys.
The scale of the challenge is immense. Potential agricultural land in the province amounts to more than 1,630,000 hectares, but fear of injury or death from UXO prevents most of the land from being cleared or put to use.
Progress is slow but steady. Since a UXO Lao branch was established in Xieng Khuang in 1994, painstaking efforts have seen more than 3,700 hectares of land cleared for farming.
Ongoing improvements to road infrastructure and other development projects are leading to more opportunities for villagers in the region. While Nonghet is not on the government’s list of the 47 poorest districts, 1,000 of the 5,000 families in the district are still living in poverty. But district officials hope that with continuing development projects, the number of poor families can be halved to10 percent by 2015.
The region receives assistance under the Poverty Reduction Fund (PRF), which is managed by the Lao government. The PRF has undertaken development projects in three poor districts in the province – Khoun, Thathom and Nonghet.
Many remote villages in Nonghet district have poor road access, and improving road infrastructure is critical to giving remote villagers access to local markets to sell their produce.
“We have assisted with infrastructure improvement, including the building of roads, artesian wells, irrigation systems and bridges, and helped local people learn new animal husbandry and agricultural production techniques,” said PRF provincial coordinator Mr Khamphone Sysomboun.
This year, the PRF plans to spend about 2 billion kip to repair infrastructure after the province was hit by tropical storm Haima in June. The PRF has a long-term focus in Xieng Khuang province, with projects aimed at contributing to development and improving villagers’ living conditions up until 2015.
The district has a total of 107 villages of which 90 percent now have road access, but travel remains difficult during the wet season.
Better road access coupled with higher consumption in urban areas of the province is translating to more commercial opportunities for remote villagers, particularly in the area of animal husbandry, which according to a recent study now accounts for 80-90 percent of household cash income. The number of pigs killed for local consumption in official abattoirs located near towns grew sevenfold between 1996 and 2003.
Expanding animal husbandry projects and the increased cultivation of maize and legumes along riverfront areas has seen the disposable incomes of villagers rise steadily in recent years.
Average annual per capita income in the district is now over 4.5 million kip and officials expect it to reach 7.9 million kip by 2015, indicating that people’s living standards are improving year by year. Initiatives to increase commercial cultivation and animal husbandry projects are central to the government’s strategy to improve the lives of the rural population in Laos, and see the nation escape least developed country status by 2020.
The Lao government defines poverty as not having enough food, lacking adequate clothing, not having permanent housing and lacking access to health, education and transport.
