23.07.2006
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Environmental Damage in the Mekong Region
_ by Tove Selin
Mekong River is the tenth largest river in the world running from the Tibetan plateau through the border lines of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, then turning towards the Great Lake, Tonle Sap, of Cambodia and finally landing at the Vietnamese delta ending at the South China Sea. It is truly a lifeline that brings the nations, cultures and livelihoods of the Mekong countries together.
There is however a serious threat to the vitality of this important river. Asian Development Bank is pushing a scheme to create a region-wide power grid called Mekong Power Gird initiative to enable a borderless electricity trade. The energy for this power grid is generated in the large hydropower dams build in the countries in the region where there is no human rights, freedom of speech and democracy, namely in Burma, Laos and China. The electricity will then be sold mainly for Thailand and Vietnam where the consumers are doomed to pay ever rising prices, like we do here in Nordic countries with our Nordic electricity pool. The major dam projects in this scheme include the Tasang dam in Burma, Nam Theun 2 in Laos and Jinghong and Nuozhadu in China.
The real cost of this grand scheme is not known. The consultants that have provided the feasibility studies have acknowledged that there is no way to calculate what a future hydropower dam, or the grid, really costs. However the real costs fall upon the people, mostly ethnic minorities, and upon the nature of Burma, Laos and China. Thousands of people are displaced from their homes without proper compensations and with weakened prospects for livelihoods. The damming usually destroys the fisheries as the migration routes of the fishes are dammed. These costs are totally excluded in the calculations.
As numerous examples have shown large dams have large environmental, social, cultural and economical costs and damage in the local level. The benefits from the dams will always go elsewhere, to capital cities, government officials, and the foreign companies and financial institutions that build and finance the dams.
Dam business is particularly lucrative for Western companies that are able to use the technology and expertise of a branch that no longer exists in their own countries where dam building has stopped. Especially Nordic countries, Sweden and Norway, and others like Japan, Australia, and Canada are eager to support their export companies to sell their products for these lucrative deals. The countries provide their companies an export guarantee to cover the political and economical risks, and cheap export credits, so that the companies will have no risk, but they will collect all the profits. Other big investor in the region is China where the government is even more involved in these export deals.
The usual pattern to build a dam is to make a so called BOOT contract: build, own, operate, transfer – where the power company builds, owns, and operates the dam for a certain time period, say 20 or 30 years, and after that the ownership is transferred to the host country. But what happens in the reality? In Southeast Asia in particular the reservoirs of the dams tend to become shallow and siltated by the time, and the dams cannot be operated. The reason for this heavy siltation is mainly the logging of the forests near the reservoir site. The other great environmental problem in the region is the logging of the forests by the foreign companies and local tycoons.
The Mekong river has been under the schemes for dam development for 50 years but yet none of the dams have been build to the Mekong river itself, except for the recent dams built in the upper part of the Mekong river called Lancang in China. The tributaries of the Mekong are however quite heavily dammed particularly in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. But the consequences of the heavy damming are already visible. There are irregular droughts and floods that destroy the livelihoods of the people living by the riverside. The regular flooding of Mekong is essential for the fisheries and agriculture in the region, but now the floods come and go irregularly and the peasants cannot prepare for them. Thus the damage is so large. Also the destruction of the forest contributes to the destabilization of the water cycle in the region.
The global, and local climate change, caused by the destruction of the forests and damming the rivers, has increased the number and destructiveness of the storms and typhoons that cause more and more damage every years. Other big threat to the Mekong is the melting of the Himalayas, the source of the Mekong river, caused by the climate change. Will Mekong dry up someday?
Can anything be done or are the people and the nature of the Mekong region doomed? What can you do?
Tove Selin,
[Editor's Note: A Japanologist by training, Tove Selin is an Asia specialist and one of the foremost environmental and human rights activists in Finland. She is the founding member of Finnish Asiatic Society and one of the organizers of Asia-Europe People's Forum to be held in Helsinki in September 2006, among other positions.]
More information on Mekong Rivers: _
International Rivers Network http://www.irn.org
Rivers and Waters of East and Southeast Asia, http://www.rwesa.org
Asian Development Bank, http://www.adb.org
Mekong River Commission, http://www.mrcmekong.org
Mekong Program on Waer, Environment and Resilience (M-POWER Network), http://www.mpowernet.org
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