Agriculture in Laos

Rice planting in Champasak province. Rice accounts for over 80% of agricultural production in Laos.

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 (about 21 percent).[1] Seventeen percent of this land area (between 850,000 and 900,000 hectares) is actually cultivated, less than 4 percent of the total area.[1]

Rice accounted for about 80 percent of cultivated land during the 1989-90 growing season, including 422,000 hectares of lowland wet rice and 223,000 hectares of upland rice.[1] 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.[1]

Cultivated land area had increased by about 6 percent from 1975 to 1977 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.[1] In addition to land under cultivation, about 800,000 hectares are used for pastureland or contain ponds for raising fish.[1] Pastureland is rotated, and its use is not fixed over a long period of time.[1]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Hopkins, Susannah (1995). "Agriculture and Forestry". In Savada, Andrea Matles (ed.). Laos: a country study (3rd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. pp. 153–160. ISBN 0-8444-0832-8. OCLC 32394600. Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)