page_title: Agriculture in Laos
section_title: Slash-and-burn
hierarchical_section_title: Agriculture in Laos / Cropping and farming systems / Slash-and-burn
context_page_description: The southeast Asian country of Laos, with a landmass of 23.68 million hectares, has at least 5 million hectares of land suitable for cultivation. Seventeen percent of this land area is actually cultivated, less than 4 percent of the total area.
  Rice accounted for about 80 percent of cultivated land during the 1989-90 growing season, including 422,000 hectares of lowland wet rice and 223,0 hectares of upland rice. This demonstrates that although there is interplanting of upland crops and fish are found in fields, irrigated rice agriculture remains basically a monoculture system despite government efforts to encourage crop diversification.
  Cultivated land area had increased by about 6 percent from 1975-77 but in 1987 only provided citizens with less than one-fourth of a hectare each, given a population of approximately 3.72 million in 1986. In addition to land under cultivation, about 800,000 hectares are used for pastureland or contain ponds for raising fish. Pastureland is rotated, and its use is not fixed over a long period of time.
context_section_description: Slash-and-burn agriculture is highly destructive to the forest environment, because it entails shifting from old to new plots of land to allow exhausted soil to rejuvenate, a process that is estimated to require at least four to six years. The extent of destruction, however, depends on the techniques used by the farmers and the overall demographic and environmental circumstances that relate to the length of the fallow period between farming cycles. Further, traditional agricultural practices allowed for forest regeneration and not the stripping of forest cover, which is a current commercial logging practice.
  Slash-and-burn fields are typically cultivated only for a year, and then allowed to lie fallow, although Kammu (alternate spellings include Khamu and Khmu) anthropologist Tayanin Damrong reports that at least through the 1970s some fields were planted two years in a row. An increasing population, encroachment on traditional slash-and-burn farming areas by other villages or ethnic groups, and gradual deterioration of the soil as a result of these pressures have led to increasingly frequent shortfalls in the harvests of midland slash-and-burn farmers.
  The slash-and-burn farming process begins with clearing the selected fields in January or February, allowing the cut brush and trees to dry for a month, and then burning them. Rice or other crops are seeded by dibble shortly before the rains begin in June, and the growing crops must be weeded two or three times before the harvest in October. Slash-and-burn farming households are seldom able to harvest a rice surplus - the harvest usually falls one to six months short of families' annual rice requirements.
caption: This is a 2001 MODIS image of southeastern Asia. In eastern Thailand, the brown coloring that dominates the center of the image and mimics the country's border with Laos and Cambodia, speaks of the massive deforestation that occurs in this region. Deforestation has played a major role in flooding in the region.
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