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- The southeast Asian country of Laos, with a landmass of 23.68 million hectares, has at least 5 million hectares of land suitable for cultivation (about 21 percent). Seventeen percent of this land area (between 850,000 and 900,000 hectares) is actually cultivated, less than 4 percent of the total area. Rice accounted for about 80 percent of cultivated land during the 1989-90 growing season, including 422,000 hectares of lowland wet rice and 223,000 hectares of upland rice. This demonstrates that although there is interplanting of upland crops and fish are found in fields, irrigated rice agriculture remains basically a monoculture system despite government efforts to encourage crop diversification. Cultivated land area had increased by about 6 percent from 1975 to 1977 but in 1987 only provided citizens with less than one-fourth of a hectare each, given a population of approximately 3.72 million in 1986. In addition to land under cultivation, about 800,000 hectares are used for pastureland or contain ponds for raising fish. Pastureland is rotated, and its use is not fixed over a long period of time. (en)
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