The Mekong's days of flowing freely look numbered, threatening food security for millions of people and friction between states along the river. In October Reuters reported Hanoi's PetroVietnam Power made an agreement with Vientiane to build and operate a $1.7 billion dam across the Mekong in Luang Prabang province.
Since 2006 Vientiane has reached understandings with Malaysia's Mega First, Thailand's Ch. Karnchang, and China's Sinohydro and Datang International power for feasibility studies for another four dams across the Mekong. Meanwhile China Southern Power Grid received permission to study a dam across the Mekong in Cambodia, and Thai engineers are examining two dams on the Thai-Lao border under Bangkok's authority.
In addition, 13 dams on Mekong tributaries in Laos should start generating electricity mostly for export by 2015, adding to ten dams already exporting some power. Another 35 are up for grabs. Just how Laos' struggling bureaucracy will manage this multi-billion dollar dam-building boom remains to be seen. Laotian officials are counting on hydro-electricity export revenues to solve the budget crisis which leaves poverty-stricken Laos dependent upon aid from China, Japan and the west. In October, the United Nation's World Food Programme reported every other child in Laos was malnourished.
For years some development experts and dam builders have suggested Laos could banish poverty by exporting hydro-electricity. And now with oil prices heading north, hydro-power further charms governments seeking to cut energy import bills and temper inflation. However this rush for hydro-power seems ill-thought and poorly coordinated, if at all, across the Mekong basin stretching from Tibet in China through Yunnan to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and then the South China Sea.
When the Mekong River Commission, charged with sustainably developing the basin by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam (China and Myanmar opted out), met at Siem Reap along with donors earlier in November Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported, ironically, concerned senior Cambodian officials opposing Laos' plans for dams and complaining their inquiries to Vientiane had gone unanswered.
Concern is warranted. Large hydro-power dams have left problematic legacies in developing countries due to poor public accountability, political neglect and weak bureaucracies. Resettlement of highlanders and environmental protection projects surrounding the Nam Theun II, which when finished in 2009 will be the largest dam in Laos, has not gone smoothly. Though arguably had the World Bank not been involved, problems would be far worse.
A series of dams on the Moon river, an important Mekong tributary in northeast Thailand, decimated fisheries leaving fisherfolk with empty nets. Many had to leave their families to seek work in Bangkok. Campaigns to restore the river drew occasional beatings from the riot police and, beside a dam, a fish ladder copied from North America. However Moon fish do not jump like American salmon, so the ladder stands abandoned, a folly which speaks volumes about officials and developers.
In northern Thailand, fish catches plunged after completion of two of at least six dams planned on the Mekong in China's Yunnan province. Effects further downstream appear negligible, so far, because most of the Mekong's water flows out of the mountains in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia.
Despite these experiences promoters say the dams' benefits will outweigh their damage. Assessing dams' impacts accurately is however difficult because scientists have yet to thoroughly study the Mekong river. Sixty million people obtain their protein from fish caught in the Mekong, amounting to a fifth of fish caught in freshwater worldwide estimates the Commission, which in 2004 identified dams as the biggest threat.
People can live without electricity but not without protein. Damage to fisheries will potentially leave millions to follow villagers from the Moon looking for work in cities already severely strained by rapid growth, pollution and slums. Proceeding as things are risks much for millions of people who have little, if any, idea about the dams or a say in the decision, nevermind threatening the Mekong giant catfish and Irrawaddy dolphin.
The Commission's donors seem worried. "Development partners are particularly concerned that public and private stakeholders are not being consulted, and that the cumulative impacts of dams on fisheries and food security are not being given adequate attention," they said in a joint statement signed by America, the European Union, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and six western governments.
TERRA, a Thai environmental organisation, accused the Commission of failing to uphold its duties, questioning its legitimacy days before the Siem Reap meeting. The Commission is drifting, torn from its charter by the political realities of serving masters coveting national interests above regional cooperation and little troubled by public participation in policy-making.
Grumbling Cambodian officials, seemingly aware dams' damage multiplies downstream, may harbinger bilateral bust-ups. Laos' dam plans are a difficult challenge for Vietnam which will have to balance corporate interests against the livelihoods of millions in the Mekong delta. Complaints from Hanoi, in private or public, may fall on deaf ears given Beijing's fast-growing influence on the back sharp increases in aid and investment.
Unless the Mekong states come together soon to seriously discuss managing the river sustainably for the common good their pursuit of narrow national interests threatens to severely reduce the environmental goods provided by the river, generate massive social upheaval, and undermine regional harmony.
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