A land-locked country, Lao PDR is an historically, culturally and environmentally rich country with diverse landscapes and ethnic populations. It is located at the heart of the Indo-Chinese Peninsula and is surrounded by China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, providing a potential for a strategic resource base and land-link in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS). It has a total land area of 236,800 km2, its borders stretching 416 km in the north with the People’s Republic of China, 492 km in the south with the Kingdom of Cambodia, 1,957 km in the east with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and 1,370 km in the west with the Kingdom of Thailand (WREA, 2009). The country is divided into seventeen provinces, one municipal province of Vientiane Capital with predominant ethnic communities scattered on its 4 major geographical divisions. Almost 80% of the country is predominantly mountainous with cultivated floodplains only along some reaches of the Mekong River and the larger tributaries. More than one-third of the country’s land area has a slope more than 30% while two-thirds of the rest has slopes ranging from more than 20 to 30%.
