And the death toll is set to rise. Before the country adopted a more open market policy in the late 1980s, a tighter centrally-planned regime guaranteed certain basic minimum standards for the poor. These standards are now gone and haven't been replaced.
Forests are among the most contaminated areas.
The HI report, 'Living with UXO,' took almost two years to compile and is the first ever UXO survey produced for a country. Funded by UNDP and Sweden and commissioned by the government clearing program UXO Lao, it documents the existence of unexploded ordnance in 8000 villages in 15 of the country's 18 provinces. But up to 30 percent of the bombs failed to explode. That debris was scattered in the country's forests and farms and there have been 11,000 accidents so far. More than 20 years later, there is still at least one accident every two days.