The image most of us of a certain age are likely to have of Laos is a wildeyed, barefoot young Pathet Lao fighter scowling at the camera, dripping in an assortment of Soviet weaponry.
Or if there is one statistic they might know, it is that Laos is the most bombed country on Earth, a plane-load of ordnance being dropped every eight minutes by 1973 as the United States prosecuted a clandestine war against the Pathet Lao (literally Land of the Lao) and its North Vietnamese ally.
More recently, it may be an image of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a one-party communist state, better known for its domestic purges, failed attempts at social engineering, bitter and largely forgotten war against the ethnic Hmong and North Korean styleeconomic policies.
Yet this landlocked country of seven million people and more than 130 ethnic groups, overlaid with strong French colonial influences, is now one of the hottest travel destinations in southeast Asia, an easy and staggeringly cheap option, especially for backpackers.
Tourists number 1.6-million annually, bringing in about half the country’s revenue. The rest is from mining (notably copper and gold), sales of hydropower, a small garment sector and agriculture.
The economy has grown at about 8% a year during the 2000s, necessary for the country to realise its goal of escaping its status as one of the poorest 20 nations worldwide by 2020.
This has also partly been on the back of increases in labour productivity, up by nearly 20% in the past decade, resulting in an annual growth in agriculture output touching 5% over this period.
As a result, rural poverty has fallen from more than 50% to less than 40%, admittedly still a very high figure, and national poverty has been halved to less than 25%.
But, despite more than $400-million in annual aid flows, in the words of one specialist, “like in many countries, donors can always find a good project, but this often just embeds the status quo”. http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-11-27-not-so-pathetic-laos
