THAILAND: Villagers Want Their Rivers – and Lives – Back

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Teena Amrit Gill

RASI SALAI, Thailand, Dec 18 2003 (IPS) - Before the sun rises, Wang is out on the Mun river, pulling in the nets he had set the day before. Gently and surely he brings in the fish, a variety of different species which will feed him and his family, but also help reap in additional income to buy other necessities.

But it has been many years since Wang has been able to fish in the river. He and other villagers along the Mun river in Rasi Salai struggled for years against the devastating impact of the Rasi Salai dam, which changed their lives forever.

Built in 1994, the first of 13 other planned dams under the Kong-Chi-Mun Water Diversion project to irrigate land in the Thai north-east, the Rasi Salai dam made more than 15,000 people landless because of its huge reservoir.

The dam also blocked fish migration routes and the livelihoods of fishing folk along the river, and destroyed the largest freshwater swamp in the Mun river basin. The forest provided food and medicinal herbs to the villagers, and acted as a fish habitat and a system of natural flood control.

In July 2002, after many years of struggle, state officials finally allowed for the opening of the seven sluice gates of the dam, and once again the river flows, the crops have ripened, the fish are starting to return, community life is becoming vibrant once more.”

It was here at the scene of this once again breathing and vibrant river where over 300 activists and people affected by dams from 62 countries descended for the Second International Meeting of Dam-Affected People and their Allies in North-east Thailand from Nov. 28-Dec. 4. The feeling was one of optimist and hope, shared with fisherfolk like Wang.

The participants said after a week-long session of intensive workshops and brainstorming that since Curitiba, (the first such meeting held in Curitiba, Brazil 1997), they have made ”significant progress in our struggles”.

“The international movement against destructive dams has shown its ability to challenge the industry in the technical, political and moral spheres. We have stopped and decommissioned some dams. In some areas we have achieved recognition of the right to just reparation,” the declaration continued.

For the villagers around it, the Rasi Salai dam itself has been a failure. Its reservoir sits on top of a huge salt dome, which makes the water too salty for irrigation. As a result, Thailand’s Office of Environmental Policy and Planning never allowed the dam’s irrigation canals to be constructed. The project cost more than six times the original estimate.

“Not only did the dam destroy our fisheries,” explains Aphirak Suthawan, an activist and villager affected by the dam, “it also destroyed our agricultural practices by flooding and salinising our lands, as well us our livestock. As a result about 60 percent of those affected by the dam have had to out migrate to find work and make a livelihood.”

Fifty-six species of fish completely have disappeared since the dam was built, according to the World Commission on Dams (WCD), a body established by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union in 1998 to review the effectiveness of large dams.

“Slowly we are seeing life return to the way it was before the dam was built. But it is going to take a long time before things are normal again, and anyway we don’t even know if the gates will be left open permanently or not,” Aphirak adds.

Though the government allowed the river to run free in July 2000, this was not a permanent decision or commitment.

Further, east of Rasi Salai close to the Cambodian border, the villagers affected by the Pak Mun dam have not had as much success. The government, after a long struggle by local villagers and activists to decommission the dam and restore the river, allowed the gates of the dam to be opened for nearly a year and a half, but at present are only allowed to be opened four months a year.

While the gates were permanently opened from June 2001 to November 2002, a study by Ubon Ratchathani University in the north-east into fisheries, social impacts and impact on electricity generation concluded that the gates should be left open for at least five years.

“We should be in a position to make decisions about our rivers, because we are the ones whose lives are affected. Even the government should not be involved in this process,” exclaims an activist working with a local organisation at Pak Mun who preferred to remain anonymous.

After the completion of the World Bank-financed 136-megawatt Pak Mun dam in 1994, the livelihoods of over 20,000 fishing folk along the Mun river, the largest tributary of the Mekong river, were destroyed because of the impact of the dam on the regular migratory cycles of fish, and on their habitat.

A fish ladder, built in to the dam as a means of mitigating this impact, was a failure. Benefits from irrigation have been non-existent because of the soil’s high water-retention capacity even beyond the boundaries of the reservoir. The water supplied by the dam has to be paid for and is unaffordable for most.

While power generation was given as one of the reasons by the state Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) not to allow for the gates to be fully opened, Pak Mun in fact only accounts for 0.5 percent of EGAT’s total generating capacity. Of this total capacity, approximately 40 percent, on an average day, is not used because of insufficient demand.