Mekong’s woes

DEVELOPERS advertise the Mekong River as “Asia’s last frontier.’’ Others warn of social and environmental disaster as China dams and blasts one of the world’s great untamed rivers, altering the flow to millions of people downstream who depend upon the river. 

“The Chinese hydropower dams, channelisation for navigation and heavy commercial shipping will kill the river,’’ says Tyson Roberts of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “The dams will be a menace to livelihoods, property and life in all of the downstream countries.’’ 

 

A young Vietnamese girl and her brother at their family's flooded hut in the middle of a rice field in Vietnam's southern Mekong river delta. Dams in the upper reaches of the Mekong may have caused severe flooding in countries which share the river this year.

Even in China, some critical voices are rising. 

“On an international river, no country should be selfish. It should consider impacts on other countries and the whole river,’’ says Xu Xioagang, an academic and environmental activist who has studied the effects of dams on Chinese communities. 

Chinese authorities argue that reshaping the Mekong will have minimal impact downstream and may be beneficial in some cases. Dams, they say, will ease the annual cycles of flooding and water shortages in the Mekong Basin, while deeper navigation channels are sure to foster regional trade and help alleviate poverty, they say. 

Most people in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) agree that the stakes are high and the pace of development is accelerating. The GMS, launched a decade ago to promote development, includes Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and China’s Yunnan province. 

The basin is home to more than 60 million people, mostly low income but largely self-sufficent farmers and fishermen who depend on the river’s rich sediment for riverside cultivation and on its cornucopia of fish. 

After Brazil’s Amazon, the Mekong is the world’s most biodiverse inland waterway, with an estimated 1,245 species found in its waters. It provides 80% of the protein needs of people who live in the basin. 

Wars and geographical remoteness kept much of the Mekong isolated. Its source in the high plateau of Tibet was only discovered in 1994. The river was bridged for the first time the same year when a span went up between Laos and Thailand. And in 1996 China completed the first dam, Manwan, across the Mekong’s main stream. 

Now, some US$40bil (RM152bil) industrial, energy, transport and tourism projects are set to change forever the lives, cultures and environments of millions. 

The changes don’t come from China alone. Dams are already up on the Mekong’s three major tributaries, in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Intensive application of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, waste discharges from urban areas, widespread logging, and the use of explosives and other non-traditional fishing methods in several countries already are degrading the ecosystem. 

 

A Cambodian woman using an inner tube to negotiate the flood waters in front of her home near the Mekong River, north-east of Phnom Penh.

Population pressures are expected to take an increasingly heavy toll. 

“Every villager living along the Mekong River now says the same thing, ‘There are fewer and fewer fish to catch,’ ’’ says David Hubbel, who works with an environmental group based in Thailand, Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance. 

“It’s the rise and fall of the water and the movement of fish that gives the people food throughout the basin,’’ Hubbel says. High waters in the rainy season allow fish to swim up tributaries to spawning grounds; low waters in the dry season permit farmers to grow crops on land newly fertilised by river silt. 

Attempts to re-engineer and regulate this vast but delicate annual cycle could spell disaster, many experts warn. 

Chinese dams may have worsened this year’s severe floods in several riverine countries, experts say. Faced with rain-swollen reservoirs, the Chinese released more water than normal into a river already high from heavy local downpours. Deaths and vast losses in crops and homes were reported in Cambodia, Thailand, Yunnan province and elsewhere in the basin. 

The Chinese-initiated project to blast rapids, shoals and reefs in order to allow ships of greater tonnage to ply the Mekong is another point of controversy. The first phase, which has started, would clear the river from the China-Myanmar border some 300km into Laos.  

An evaluation sponsored by the Mekong River Commission, a river basin authority based in Phnom Penh, has criticised the environmental impact study for the project as “fundamentally flawed,’’ its findings simply “speculation’’. 

The study, completed in just six months, was carried out by a joint experts group from China, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. The river commission asked Australia’s Monash Environmental Institute for the evaluation. 

Critics of the blasting say the fast flow of water would cause riverbank erosion and the destruction of reefs would kill off prime breeding grounds for fish. 

“China’s (moves) will turn the Mekong into a biologically degraded, badly polluted, dying river like the Yangtze and other big rivers of China,’’ says Roberts, the fisheries expert with the Washington DC-based institute. 

Officials in the region have muted their responses to China despite criticism by academics and villagers in downstream countries.  

But Thailand has at least temporarily halted blasting of its section of the river, while Laos is sceptical. “Millions of Laotians rely on the Mekong. Their lives will be affected by so many changes on the river,’’ the Laotian ambassador to Thailand, Hiem Phommachanh has said. 

China is unlikely to cease building dams, which it began without consulting its neighbours and without assessing the impact downstream. 

China may construct a cascade of as many as eight dams on the river in Yunnan province. The second one, Dachaoshan, has been completed and a third, Xiowan, is scheduled for commissioning in 2012. At the equivalent of 100 stories high, it would be among the world’s tallest dams. 

 

Dawn breaks over the Mekong River as small fishing boats drift downstream, with fishermen casting their nets in Phnom Penh.

Feasibility studies are under way for two others and there is talk about another three dams. Domestic politics as well as China’s seemingly unquenchable need for water and hydropower drive the dam building projects on the Mekong and elsewhere. 

China must increase its electricity output by 5-6% each year until 2020 to meet economic goals. And enriching relatively poor provinces like Yunnan through hydropower is tied to China’s “Go West’’ policy, an effort to close a potentially destabilising gap between booming areas of eastern China and the have-nots of the west. – AP

Copyright © 1995-2002 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd (Co No 10894-D)
Managed by I.Star.