WHILE economic growth is increasing across the country, the Authority of Luang Namtha province has set itself an ambitious target.
    Over the next five years, to the end of 2010, the province hopes to achieve an average of seven to eight percent economic growth a year. In order to achieve this goal and to engage the province in modern industry, the provincial authority will focus on poverty reduction and infrastructure development. The aim is to increase economic growth in the province considerably in order to help lifting the country out of poverty and out of the list of the least developed nations.
   Another focus of the authority will be on developing the province’s agriculture sector in order to modernize work methods. This, combined with a focus on integrating transport between rural and urban areas, should help to close the gap in rural-urban development and increase economic development.
   The authorities will also seek to educate people living in remote areas on the environmental hazard presented by slash and burn agriculture. They will also intensify their effort to get slash and burn farmers to move to more sustainable agricultural practices, like crop planting and animal husbandry. It won’t be plain sailing for the province though, as a local source revealed that the average growth of the province’s gross domestic product over the last five year period has only been 3.3 percent, well below the target of seven to eight percent that forms the core of the latest development plan.
The sector’s breakdown of the percentage of population working in various sectors as of this year is: agriculture and forestry, 78 percent, industry and handicraft manufacturing, 10 percent and services, 12 percent.  In 2004-2005, the average annual income per head of population was about USD 280. State investment in development came in the form of over 432 projects across the various sectors worth 204 billion kip (over USD 18 million).
Some of the projects were as follows: - In the socio-cultural area there were 118 projects, worth over 62 billion kip, and in the rural development sector there were 32 projects, worth over 2 billion kip.