World Food Policy Volume 3, No. 2/Volume 4, No. 1, Fall16/Spring17 | Page 85

Land , State , and Society in Laos : Ethnographies of Land Policies
Figure 1 . Map of Laos
© P . Petit 2017
Introduction

In 2013 , I was chatting with a taxi driver in Vientiane , explaining that I had come back from Attapeu Province where I was working for a food security project . I mentioned it was difficult to work in a context where rubber tree plantations were implemented so extensively . The driver went on with humour , saying that the government had sold all the land north of Louang Prabang to Chinese , and all the land south

2 Lao transliterations are based on Mingbuapha & Becker ( 2003 ); usual spelling has been conserved for toponyms .
85 of Paksan to Vietnamese . He concluded without further ado that “ lattabaan kôn boo dii ” 2 , “ the government is made up of bad people ”.
I was surprised that a taxi driver would talk so casually on that topic . I thought land issues were a “ public secret ” ( Taussig , 1999 ) and could not be debated so openly . However , their publicity seems on the rise nationally . For example , the state-owned Vientiane Times dedicated its “ Opinion ” column on 18 June 2013 to the question : “ Do you think that community resettlement