This does by the way, put into perspective, the American bombing raids on Laos during the Vietnam war. The US dropped, on Laos alone, a volume of bombs about equivalent to all the bombs dropped in all theatres by both sides during the Second World War. Just looking at the terrain and those villages that are accessible is enough to determine that such an attack is bound to be ineffective. Its not so much taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut, as taking one of the world's largest ever bombing campaigns to kill three people and a goat. In addition, although LeMay's famous quote about bombing them back to the stone age applied to Vietnam rather than Laos, this objective was never achievable - most of the tribes are not very far from the stone age. True they use metal implements, though not many, but in many significant ways they are living a stone age existence already.
One of the signifiers of the difficult task facing the Laos government is that life expectancy throughout Laos is about 58. Most of the reason is the mortality of the hill tribes. Again an estimate, it is believed that the life expectancy of the hill tribes is 35. Equally there is no real concept of the value of education - if male children know enough to poison a crossbow bolt and hunt a small animal; if female children know enough to remove the inedible portions of some of the jungle fruits - this is enough.
Some of the government initiatives designed to improve services and facilities available to the tribes involve some fairly standard measures. The most visible of these is the forced relocation of some of the more remote tribes into joint villages with existing tribes who live in a more accessible place. Of course such force-majeure generates its own resentment and problems. Most of the tribes have a subsistence living. They can support themselves from their traditional jungle pursuits, supplemented by a very little agriculture. If they get relocated, they will encounter the concept of a cash economy for the first time. This implies that if they want to access any of the services being made available to them - health or education they are likely to have to interact with a town and money at some stage or other. The first law of ecology, "We can never do merely one thing", rears its head at this point.To do this, they need to produce a surplus -often for the first time. This implies a much larger commitment to agriculture, which in turn, in this part of the world, means a substantial increase in slash and burn agriculture. This has several knock on effects. First, just for the vegetation to recover some shadow of its former self, will take 25+ years from a particular patch of ground ceasing to be in cultivation. Secondly, though jungle is astonishingly fecund - almost by definition - once the soil has been denuded of nutrients it can take centuries of no human impact to re-establish the original balance. It can be denuded easily by agriculture and the growing of cash crops. Along the river, the scars not only of current slash and burn agriculture can be seen, but also the scars from the previous five or six iterations of this practice.
The lack of a money based economy, and the perceived need to provide services to these peoples, results in many distortions and complaints. The tribe people complain that the local town takes advantage of them - the local yokels - because they don't understand money. As a result the hill tribes believe they are always being taken for a ride by the townies - particularly for education. One of the carry overs from a non-monied economy - where wealth is measured by the number of large baulks of timber stored under the house - is that the people are in fact ripped off in a major way by unscrupulous Chinese buyers coming in to purchase the proceeds of illegal logging for teak, rosewood, and mahogany. This of course encourages the trade, as logging is seen as a cash crop. Incidentally, I have absolutely no idea how such buyers extract their purchases from the houses of the hill tribes. The search is also on for cash crops. This has historically been much of the root of the drugs trade - the area I'm talking about is the edge of the golden triangle. Drugs provide high density value - lots of money (comparatively speaking) for small packages.
As an aside when I returned to Thailand, and was starting to travel from Chang Rai to Bangkok, the police as is often the case on public buses, checked the passengers. The only person questioned was a young mother evidently from one of the hill tribes, with a small baby in arms. Not only was she questioned, but was also pat searched, as was the nappy (?) of the baby.
The hotels along the tourist trail - the Mekong - are doing a very good job in many ways. They provide a source of cash for the immediately adjacent village(s). They do provide support and encouragement in all sorts of practical ways to the local tribes. At each of the hotels I stayed at 95% of the food served came from the local village (the odd 5% being things like alcohol, and western foodstuffs). Much of the efforts of local projects has been to find a cash crop that does not have the disastrous effects of drug or hard wood logging. They have had some success with Laos coffee - it is starting to make a market for itself.
And yet, cliched though it may be, the idea of the primitive but happy natives living in the garden of Eden, there does seem to be some truth to it. The Laotian hill tribe peoples do seem to have a happy (though short) life. Obviously they have never known any thing else, and the alternative to living such a life is to not live such a life (and usually this means not living at all).
And yet......