in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR
or Laos). In particular, I want to highlight that one
of the main motivations of the government of Laos
in granting large-scale land concessions is to remove
peasants, and particularly indigenous peoples, from
their conditions of production because they are seen
as making unproductive use of resources and as being
resistant to fully integrating into the market economy.
Indeed, in Laos most indigenous peoples have,
until quite recently, been heavily reliant on mixed
subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture in
which a large portion of the food consumed has been
obtained through family farm agriculture, as well as
hunting, fishing, and the gathering of a wide variety
of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) from the
commons. Crucially, these peoples have not become
embedded in the wage-labour economy like most
rural populations in the USA, Western Europe or
other industrialized parts of the world. This does
not mean that indigenous peoples in Laos do not,
at times, depend on wage labour, especially during
the agricultural off-season. Moreover, as Rigg (2005)
and Shoemaker et al. (2001) have pointed out, wagelabour
is becoming increasingly important in rural
Laos, even without the introduction of large-scale
economic land concessions. The degree of importance
is, however, geographically uneven, with some regions,
villages and peoples engaging much more in wagelabour
than others, and indigenous peoples tending
to rely less on it than others. Thus, while the role of
subsistence agriculture in rural Laos should not be
overemphasized or romanticized; neither should we
underappreciate nor deny the continued importance
of subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture for
large portions of the population, at least for the timebeing,
and especially for upland indigenous peoples
whose livelihoods are particularly linked to the land.
Still, many indigenous farmers are rapidly being
propelled into wage-labour markets in ways that
cannot be considered voluntary, and since this is the
focus here, I will not dwell on less coercive transformations
of labour that are occurring simultaneously,
although I do recognize their importance. I wish to
demonstrate that the policy of the government of