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For the second time this year, the government has asked the United Nations and most countries having diplomatic relations with Vientiane for a relief donation. The U.S. has given 10,000 tons of rice and is considering a request for 20,000 tons more. There is no question that the relief is needed. Refugees report, however, that much of the rice ends up feeding not the Laotians but an estimated 40,000 Vietnamese troops scattered throughout the eastern half of the country and on the Cambodian border. The Vietnamese are encamped mainly because the Pathet Lao have been unable to eliminate strong pockets of armed resistance by both disaffected hill tribesmen and remnants of the old royalist army. There have been signs that Cambodian forces have cooperated with some resistance groups in fighting the Vietnamese. The Laotians and Cambodians make curious bedfellows: about all they agree on is that the only good Vietnamese is a dead Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese presence raises another question: Do the Pathet Lao really control the country? The Chinese, who are completing a long-term road-building project in the north of Laos, are entrenched in the areas bordering Yunnan province. The Russians maintain a low profile in Vientiane, but they have an estimated 1,500 advisers and technicians in Laos and exert enough influence that the Chinese have lately accused Laos of being, like Viet Nam, a Soviet puppet. The Pathet Lao have imprisoned many of the country's best-trained people in so-called re-education camps and have lost tens of thousands more to the exodus. Sums up one diplomat: "Without the Russians and the Vietnamese and the Chinese running things, the Pathet Lao wouldn't be able to do much at all."
Agriculture is crucial, and the government has dramatically stepped up its campaign to create farming cooperatives. One such coop, the Tha Ngon Agricultural Development Project, about 20 miles northeast of Vientiane, is an impressive integrated unit of "new towns" surrounded by large, well-tended rice fields; a huge fish pond is being dug out of the jungle by modem earth-moving equipment. Says Sombat Chounlamany, a ranking foreign ministry official in Vientiane: "We think that developing cooperatives as soon as possible is the best way of both transforming the means of production and increasing output. If we don't follow this policy, our bad economic situation will turn even worse."
Nonetheless, even government officials admit privately that there is substantial resistance to the coops. Farmers have slaughtered draft animals, for example, rather than donate them to collectives. Similarly, government efforts to purchase up to 30% of private farm production at low ofiicial prices have induced some farmers either to produce mainly for their own needs or sell exclusively on the black market. Although the country's long-range agricultural prospects are promising, Laos for the next few years will need all the help it can get from international aid agencies and its more prosperous Asian neighbors.