Where did you get your info?

If it is not on here

http://www.kpl.net.la/

or here

http://www.vientianetimes.org.la/


then it is not news. It is gossip.

My Lao friends, whose families live in the rural areas in the north, have not benefited from it. To sell their fruits, vegetables & livestock, the villagers have to get to the nearest market. But there's no road from their village. To get to the river, they either have to carry it & walk for 3 hours along a dirt track (mud in rainy season) & cross several streams (sometimes flooded & cannot be crossed in rainy season), or transport it by 'rot tai', & from there another 6 hours by boat to the town.

'rot tai' & boats need fuel, any increase in fuel prices & boat fares hits them, it's the only way they can get to the outside world & hospital, etc. Boat fares on the upper Mekong & Nam Ou have increased over the years. Even if they get to the town & sell their stuff for a higher price, the gains are cancelled out. Even when fuel prices were lower, some who moved to the city (in order to study beyond primary school) couldn't afford to travel home for 3-5 years.

Right now most families in their villages grow enough rice for themselves every year, but not much leftover to sell. Those who don't have enough rely on borrowing rice from other families. But when they get freak weather everyone gets hit badly. Some years ago floods damaged some families' farms & they had to move to growing rice on hillslopes instead of flat land, harder work & poorer yields. Another time cold weather & frost ruined the whole harvest (they have only a single crop per year) & killed all the fish. A whole lot of boys have been sent to live as novices in temples in towns so that their families don't need to feed them.

World Food Program distributes rice, etc in parts of Laos where villages can't produce enough for their own consumption. Increase in rice & fuel prices means they can distribute less to fewer villages with the same amount of budget.
http://www.wfp.org/country_brief/indexcountry.asp?country=418

On top of that, they don't bother to use their own cars, they better walk. They don't need to buy the expensive oil either.

Hmm I think you mean that they don't even have (& don't even dream of having) their own cars...not that they have cars but 'don't bother' to use them...?

Perhaps what I have described above is not representative of rural Laos as a whole, being skewed by the fact that almost all my Lao friends are from the poorer villages...but it doesn't change the fact that they & their villages exist in Laos...

TSP: in future, if you have a chance to, do visit the rural areas in the north & see for yourself, although hopefully by that time things would have improved. Very beautiful part of your country. Or get to know more of your countrymen who come from those areas & ask them to tell you about their villages & their life story. In the south, there are rural areas like parts of Salavan that are also in a similar situation.

Some markets in the far north are only active a few days per month, on those days people from surrounding villages walk for hours & row their boats to the market to sell things they collect from the forest & to buy things that they cannot make by themselves (e.g. sewing needles, salt, medicine, etc), & then make the long journey home again...they can't afford to do that more often, too tiring & time-consuming.

I don't mean that they've never seen a car, I mean that no one in their village has one. Those who've been to the towns have seen cars & had a chance to ride on buses & tuktuks before, but not often (need to save money). They told me that's why they 'mao rot' easily, they're not used to travelling on motor vehicles.

where one provincial official is calling on the central government to provide food aid and step up irrigation efforts.

For this second part of the original post, I don't know. No source stated...I can only tell you that I believe the first part (surge in global food prices is making life even more difficult for residents of impoverished Laos) is true.

Anonymous wrote:

---

TSP: in future, if you have a chance to, do visit the rural areas in the north & see for yourself, although hopefully by that time things would have improved. Very beautiful part of your country. Or get to know more of your countrymen who come from those areas & ask them to tell you about their villages & their life story. In the south, there are rural areas like parts of Salavan that are also in a similar situation.

Some markets in the far north are only active a few days per month, on those days people from surrounding villages walk for hours & row their boats to the market to sell things they collect from the forest & to buy things that they cannot make by themselves (e.g. sewing needles, salt, medicine, etc), & then make the long journey home again...they can't afford to do that more often, too tiring & time-consuming.

I don't mean that they've never seen a car, I mean that no one in their village has one. Those who've been to the towns have seen cars & had a chance to ride on buses & tuktuks before, but not often (need to save money). They told me that's why they 'mao rot' easily, they're not used to travelling on motor vehicles.

where one provincial official is calling on the central government to provide food aid and step up irrigation efforts.

For this second part of the original post, I don't know. No source stated...I can only tell you that I believe the first part (surge in global food prices is making life even more difficult for residents of impoverished Laos) is true.

---

I totally agree with this person's comment., I doubt this person must  be knowledegable quaite a lot about rural life in Laos.
Not is every rural life affected by the rising price of fuel that is true, some certainly are. Imagine that rural people don't have car, that is probably true, but some do have tractor, and I am talking about two-wheel tractor here which also consumes deisel. Tractor attached with the trialer and rubber tires are widely used as a transport mean in many areas of Laos. Rising cost of transportation reduces incentive of people to travel, even to go to the hospital for medical checkup.
Besides, increasing deisel price results in high cost for tractor hire in which farmers acquire for tillage operation of the paddy field. The fact is that many farmers have to give a large amount of rice for the tractor hire since they are not affordable to pay by cash, and some of them end up rice shortage.