Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos

Chapter 5: Stories of State

86 Fields of Desire 86 5 Stories of State After dinner one night in August 2003, Cit sat on the step to the kitchen and lit a cigarette from the kerosene lamp. “This year, Laos is asking for rice from other countries. The whole country is in drought. Every single person is going to be affected. I’m not sure which donors are being approached: whoever has extra rice, Laos is asking for those foreign countries to send rice to help.” “Is it the World Food Program (ongaan ahaan look)?” I asked. “Yes, I think so. Laos is asking them to send rice. But the foreigners should come themselves to distribute it. They should come and divide it in each village, give so much to each household. Otherwise, say our village is meant to get 10 tonnes, only 3 or 4 will actually arrive.” “Where will the other 6 or 7 go?” “They sell it, in shops.” “Who? The muang (District and/or state)?” I asked. “Yes, the muang. They sell it to stores. You can see the writing on the rice sacks, ‘Assistance from Japan,’ but they sell it in the store. One time some Japanese people saw the sacks being sold in the store and they took them back.” Mother Phong had been listening as she worked in another part of the kitchen, but this story was one that she knew well, that she had told me often, and she came then to sit with us by the lamp to tell it again. I knew, from previous tellings, that this story referred to the time just after the 1975 revolution, when she had been living in Pakse. There was a food shortage and some rice aid had been sent from Japan. She said, “We could see the name of the donor ‘Japan’ ‘Japan’ ‘Japan’ written on each bag. The government officials were selling the rice, but we knew that it was free assistance from overseas. But the government, they are not honest. Some Japanese people came to the market and saw the officials selling the rice, so the Japanese took it back again. Because the government was dishonest, the people obtained no rice, nothing Stories of State 87 to eat. But what can we do? Khao pen cao pen naay (They are the princes/ owners and the leaders). If they let us eat, we eat, if they don’t, we don’t.” Cit, seeming to take this as confirmation about his ruminations about the possibility of rice aid this year, continued, “They will only sell it …. If the donors distribute the rice themselves, then there will be no problem.” I pointed out that the current trend in development design was to foster capacity in recipient countries by employing local staff, so there was little chance that foreign staff would personally oversee the distribution of foreign rice aid. “The policy is that Lao people have to practice how to do this themselves ,” I said. “They get to practice but we have to keep just sitting tight (Khao aeeb heet hak hao tong yuu sue sue),” Mother Phong commented with feeling. I asked if the village had ever received any rice aid before. “Only one time, around 1997, but it wasn’t free assistance. They made us dig for it, dig the road,” said Cit. One meter earned 3 kilos of rice. However, payments had to be made for the sacks the rice came in, for the cost of the boat transporting the rice, and for the rice itself. “Anything that they could charge for, they did,” Cit concluded. He seemed disgusted at these impositions. I asked about the rice aid distribution that I had seen on the account books of the District office recorded for 2001, but neither Mother Phong nor Cit had any recollection of it. “They must have sold it all,” Mother Phong surmised. Our conversation then turned to the road to nowhere (a World Bank project described in Chapter Seven). At this point of time, the road project had been decided upon at the District level, but no implementation had begun. Cit predicted that, like the earlier projects he had mentioned, the project would be scuttled by corruption: “They plan to steal the money—maybe not all of it. Just most of it. That’s how civil servants are. They take the money meant for the people. I believe that the World Bank really wants to help us, but they give the money to the civil...