We have a special guest this year on the site: Laos. Previously this site has been nothing but China, though I'm now including Laos here with good reason (not just because it happens to be where I visited on this same trip).

China: "You're next, Laos!"

Northern Laos is what Xishuangbanna was 50 years ago, and Xishuangbanna is quite possibly what northern Laos will be like in 50 years.

For now, sparsely populated northern Laos is for the most part unadulterated tropical rain forest, but that has slowly begun to change over the past decade. In the mid-90's, having nearly turned [eastern] Banna into one sprawling rubber plantation, Chinese companies started looking across the border at the vast stretches of unused land in Laos. While not nearly as rampant as Banna, rubber has already begun to take hold in Luang Namtha and Muang Sing provinces.

In Laos, one can actually still see forest from towns, even those growing rubber, almost unprecedented in modern Banna.

Chinese companies come in and sign contracts with villages, not only giving them a cut of the profits and providing almost everything required (saplings, expertise, and even labor in some cases), but also bringing electricity, roads, and other basic infrastructure to the local area. China actually has a long history of support in Laos, being a large, wealthy neighbor, and actually built most of the roads in at least the country's north. Of course, the companies are getting the better end of the deal, but when the locals don't really have a better option, and receive benefits like free electricity and other perks their poor government can't provide, there's little question as to whether to accept.

But China seems on route to impose its massive scale on its tiny neighbor. Out west a massive tract of land somewhere from 300,000 to 400,000 hectares has already been signed away for rubber planting. To put that in perspective, only about 25,000 hectares of contracts are currently being planted in Laos. For access, the company involved is building a network of roads leading to essentially the middle of nowhere. The lumber obtained from clearing is an additional bonus in the deal, probably better in the end anyway, since the Laoatians simply burn everything they cut down, even valuable wood!

As if someone hasn't quite thought this entire thing through, however, there are little details that will require some big solutions, like where do you get the labor to tap that much rubber? Supposedly part of the plan is to "establish" a new village for every 200 hectares of rubber (that's nearly 2000 villages...), but still, where do the people come from? The entire population of northern Laos isn't even 300k (and remember that you need at least one person/hectare). China certainly has the people, and Laos has taken similar measures before with Vietnamese workers in the south, but the cost is discouraging (2,000 RMB/person/year).

Also stunning is the length of time for which Laos has leased the land: two rubber cycles! One cycle is 35 years (the average lifespan of a rubber tree), so that's more or less leasing a giant chunk of northern Laos to China for 70 years, or three generations...

It's still early in the game, and to its credit, Laos is trying to slow down the process by temporarily banning all new contracts, but the government is weak, and poor. The whole situation almost sounds like the U.S. taking advantage of some third-world country.

Adjacent to these plots of cleared land, you can still see what used to grow there (it's now hard to find such a contrast any more in Banna, but is a relatively common sight across northern Laos):

Here fenced in saplings in Namtha wait at the starting line for their chance to tame the wild mountains:

There are some patches of earlier, more mature rubber trees near the town of Namtha:

[enough trees, aren't there any people?]