Expected Project Outcomes

The Green Earth Centre and Research Center was created to explicitly support the dramatic need for agricultural capacity building for farmers in southern Laos.  Eighty-five percent of the Lao population lives in villages and depends upon daily food gathering and agricultural activities for subsistence.  Currently, farmers in Salavan Province (and most of southern Laos) have no support to address annual food shortages, no access to markets, no access to new and appropriate agricultural technologies and no linkages to other resource organizations. The Center will do the following to address these and other concerns and in support of the project objective:

• Provide a full time venue for agricultural training;
• Provide a venue for agricultural research (biogas, water delivery and storage, soil preparation, organic fertilizer preparation, etc.);
• Provide a venue to demonstrate and learn proven, value added, low cost technologies (green houses, drip irrigation, forages, etc.)
• Provide a venue to learn food processing and packaging technologies;
• Provide a venue to raise livestock intensively and use limited land more efficiently;
• Provide linkages to market agricultural products;
• Encourage farmers to transfer technologies to their own villages and farms (with limited VFI follow-up);
• Provide a venue for district officials to learn new technologies and to reach more farmers;
• Provide a full time VFI staff, district government agriculture specialists and local farmers to provide training, research leadership and extension support;
• In a third phase the Center will add several bungalows for tourists as an income source;

Eventually, after the initial infrastructure is complete, the Center will gradually be operated as a self-reliant social enterprise, selling services (to other NGOs and international organizations) and products as a model for sustainability.