 Agri-culture is the main source of livelihood for 95% of the rural households in Lao PDR. Almost 80% of this cropped area is dedicated to growing rice. Rice is life for the people of Laos who have been planting and nurturing their rice fields for hundreds of years. But the land doesn't always give back what these farmers put in. And with a country whose birth rate is the highest in the region at 2.5%, increasing rice production to feed their country is a high priority. In the southern province of Savannah, farmers' fields are continually at the mercy of drought and flooding. Unknown to some, there is a field here which has been privy to especially bred Laomodern variety or LMV rice plant. Mugat paek tak ka lahay, pagpagalong siwitakon haong kwa hetbaek, patong patan kaw ko mo yagpokin na lea. Mo dahay kaya, hindi na haong dahay kaya. Diwa dahay punpalit suong luyun, luyun kaw topkung. Dahay kaw mo dahay wang 3 ton, hong 7 ton, hong 6 ton topi. The Nakao village is just one of the many communities which have been part of the Lao-Iri research and training project. A partnership between the Lao-PDR Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the International Rice Research Institute, or IRI, this collaborative project was established in 1990 to assist a government of Lao-PDR to achieve their national goal of rice self-sufficiency on a sustainable basis. And for more than a decade of this 15-year partnership with IRI, the Lao people have been celebrating rice self-sufficiency. For Laos, rice makes up 70% of their daily calorie requirement. When Lao people speak of achieving food self-sufficiency, they mean having enough rice to eat. The new technology for the rice production needs to be based on the new varieties, new agronomy aspect, and also increased in the year. The feedback from the farmers is very important because we keep the seed to the farmer after that we get the information from them. From 1993, we released the first variety and the farmers grow this variety and get the high yielding. Over the course of the project, 18 new varieties were released. They have been so successful that 3 quarters of the households using Lao-modern varieties were self-sufficient or had a surplus in rice, while 64% of the farmers planting traditional varieties were rice-deficient. At the end of the year, the farmers planting traditional varieties were rice-deficient. These are high yielding, moderate duration rice varieties which have irreparantage. These rice varieties would not be there today if it were not for the training and the assistance of the Lao-iri project. Major achievement is Lao Chin Bang because here in this Chin Bang we keep 13,193 traditional indigenous varieties. We have to preserve this for the sustainable use by the researchers and farmers. To train people to identify and characterize those assessions and to use them in a breeding program, the Lao-iri project has also supported the establishment of a training center out at the Agricultural Research Center at a village called Ngapok. I think training is very useful. I have learned English, writing, reporting how to collect rice for research in the corn room. The main thing before going further to disseminate our technology to the farmer, is that first we train our participants, we train our staff. Koy ka-repo tiyan nung anwa koy ka-pag-kong jelichut na jami kong kanana koy ka-hamhiyan, na kan-puk-kaw. Technik ka-jot na kan-puk na na koy ka-nama-bok kaw-dum na na nila. Although Laos has attained national rice self-sufficiency since 1999, the rice-sufficiency of the poor is estimated to be only 6.8 months in a year. In the Apland Environmental Laos, farmers' rice fields slope across the phases of the mountainside, creating more challenges for researchers and the farming communities.