Deal #3971

Residents of Yeup village in Sekong’s Thateng district have been fighting since 2006 for alternative land and additional compensation since the government granted their land to LVF. Since 2011 villagers have been signing protest petitions against LVF and submitting them to the prime minister’s office and the National Assembly Source: RFA & RFA Laos Some villagers also spoke about their plight on a radio program in Vientiane. Provincial authorities were angry that the villagers went over their heads, and some leaders were arrested in 2012 and forced to sign papers promising to stop resisting Source: Resistance and Contingent Contestations to Large-Scale Land Concessions

Since 2006, the conflict over the land in Yeup has been going on since 2006 because the company had “grabbed” 121 hectares from 55 families, though its concession from authorities legally allowed it to take only 42 hectares Source: RFA

By the time the villagers realized what had happened, their farmland had been seized, cleared and planted with rubber seedlings, leaving the 92 families in the community with no agricultural or common lands. All they had left was the land where their houses are located. During his field study to Yeup village in 2017, Baird said that the provincial police had visited the village in order to prepare documentation that would allow the villagers to officially relocate if the provincial government can find them an appropriate place to move. The villagers who have taken control of part of the rubber plantation have made it clear that they are ready to accept the plantation if they are offered a good place to resettle Source: Resistance and Contingent Contestations to Large-Scale Land Concessions

Villagers lost their land because of this expansion, crops were also destroyed. When villagers lost their land, they had to work as labor in the company or migrated to another province to work as daily workers. Source: Sound Cloud Two children were released in June 2018. The two were detained by police in July 2017 together with 12 other villagers from Yeub village who were taken into custody for obstructing workers and cutting down trees on land granted by the government to a Vietnamese rubber company. Source: Monitor Civicus

55 families from Yeub village, Thateng district of Sekong province were not happy with the arranged land that government allocated for them to compensation the land loss. Villagers said that the allocated land was not suitable for growing and not good quality to do cultivation and it was also very far from their homes. Source: RFA Lao 1

The Lao organization, the Lao Biodiversity Association (LBA), first reported on the problems with rubber plantation development in Thateng in 2008. Some villagers came together and petitioned the National Assembly in the capital city of Vientiane for their land to be returned.