Local Vulnerability, Project Risk, and Intractable Debt: The Politics of Smallholder Eucalyptus Promotion in Salavane Province, Southern Laos

Abstract

This paper analyses the ideology, implementation and outcomes of a donor-based smallholder tree planting project in Lao PDR. Drawing on project documents and local level fieldwork in southern Laos, an analysis of the failure of this project to promote viable smallholder eucalyptus plantations is forwarded. The donor vision of producing new rural subjectivities, transforming subsistence oriented peasants into smallholder arboreal entrepreneurs was spectacularly unsuccessful. A series of unintended consequences resulted, which undermined both the livelihoods of enrolled farmers and the financial position of the key institutional partner, the Lao Agricultural Promotion Bank. This paper provides an analysis of this failure, emphasizing differing conceptions of and responses to vulnerability and risk between rural farmers in Salavane province and the project proponents. While maintaining interpretations which centre upon project mismanagement and corruption, this paper also argues for a perspective in which even failed donor tree planting projects are constitutive of broader patterns of political power, through which new ideologies of development are formulated and deployed. Drawing on the work of James Ferguson, David Mosse, and Gillian Hart, this paper argues that the ADB Industrial Tree Plantation Project provides an analytical window into the nature and exercise of state power, donor influence, and the politics of agrarian transformation in globalizing Laos.