This rapid uptake of the plantation concession model supports the government’s policies to increase forest coverage , foreign investment and replacement of shifting cultivation. However, although there have been significant employment opportunities due the rapid expansion of plantations, this may change once production advances into later stages and the work of weeding and tree maintenance is less labour intensive (Kenney-Lazar 2012). Wages are paid to supervisors who then distribute monies to workers, but in many cases wages are reduced or withheld on the grounds of underperformance or outright corruption. In some cases, workers have been promised USD 3.55 per day, but had their pay reduced to between USD 2.36 to USD 2.96 at their supervisor’s discretion (Kenney-Lazar 2012). Companies and authorities often depict Lao labourers from ethnic minorities as ‘lazy’ (McAllister 2015) and use this as a ‘reason’ to import labourers from their countries of origin (Li 2011; Baird 2011). Thus, as Baird (2011) highlights, the emergence of large-scale concessions in Laos has led to new exploitative forms of wage labour in which villagers are forced to become labourers on what were in many cases once their own lands.