ASIA: Ten Years Later, Vision for Mekong Region Flawed – Critics

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 4 2002 (IPS) - The first-ever leaders’ summit to endorse major development projects for the Mekong region on Sunday may have grabbed the headlines, but they failed to impress environmentalists who say it confirms the flawed vision behind many of these mega-plans.

These projects, which promise to bring power grids, highways, telecommunications and dams, were endorsed by the heads of governments of the six countries that share the mighty Mekong river, which flows from Tibet and out into the South China Sea.

The leaders of China, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia met in Phnom Penh, Cambodia ahead of a summit of South-east Asian heads of government, marking a decade since the concept of an integrated Mekong sub-region was pushed by the Asian Development Bank (AsDB).

A joint declaration by the six leaders said they ”applaud the significant progress” in the first decade of the sub-region’s programme and vowed to ”integrate the development programmes in our national agenda”.

But the projects earmarked for the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) will ”have impacts across borders,” says Dave Hubbel of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA), a Bangkok-based environment lobby.

Yet ”these projects do not account for the social and environmental impacts that countries will feel downstream,” he adds. ”Although the GMS is about integrated development, the impact is felt in individual countries,” such as communities in Thailand or Cambodia that say dams in the upper Mekong are adversely affecting their livelihood.

Activists say these plans do not adequately consider their cross-border effects or provide mechanisms to address them, 10 years after ambitious schemes for the region were laid out.

The Mekong declaration says leaders ”recognise that social and environmental factors are essential for sustainable development”. But ”we have to question the development model being promoted by governments,” says Witoon Permpongsacharoen, director of TERRA.

For instance, he asks, ”In a regional project like this, who will take responsibility for the debt incurred? GMS projects will promote major infrastructure (in the region) but it will also increase the public debt for the countries. That will also impact on social and welfare projects.”

The mega-development plans presented in Phnom Penh include the creation of a regional power grid and linking the region through highways and telecommunications.

The AsDB, the major financier of this initiative, gives an optimistic forecast of what lies ahead. ”By the end of this decade, the GMS countries will be even more closely connected,” said AsDB president Tadao Chino in a statement after the leaders’ summit.

”At the same time, the sub-region’s role as a strategic bridge between East and South-east Asia as well as between South and East Asia, will become increasingly important,” he added.

The push for the GMS was launched a decade ago to increase development, trade and cooperation within the region. The Manila-based bank and investors saw the region, home to economies in transition like Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, as full of opportunities for commerce.

Through the regional power grid, for instance, the Mekong countries hope to benefit from cheap and extensive supply of energy through hydroelectric power. It envisions that countries with high-energy demands, like Thailand, will be able to buy electricity produced by dams in China, Burma and Laos.

The cost of such a grid is estimated at nearly 4.5 billion U.S. dollars.

But for environmentalists, an integrated power grid that envisages 32 dams built across the 4,800-kilometre Mekong river can be expected to have severe impacts on local communities and the environment, and raises questions of how to balance these costs.

Already, fishermen in northern Thailand and Laos say water levels in the Mekong have changed since China built its first dam on the river, the Manwan dam, in Yunnan province in 1996. Cambodia has had a similar experience, activists say.

”People have been affected by the flow of the river. It is not natural. The flow is changed by electricity generation,” Hubbel explains.

China’s dams, designed to provide electricity for its big cities as well as Thailand, would impound water in the wet season and release water in the dry season, causing higher water levels during the dry season that disrupt fishing and agriculture.

People living along the river downstream in Vietnam and in Cambodia have ”lost their livelihoods as the unnatural and highly erratic flooding caused by water releases from the dam’s hydroelectric power generation operations have washed away livestock (and) destroyed fish habitats,” states a TERRA background paper.

The dams in Yunnan – the Chinese government is now building two more dams along the Mekong and has plans for five more – will disrupt the river’s complex ecosystem, according to TERRA.

”Over 60 million people depend on the Mekong River for food, water, transport and many other aspects of their lives, with about 90 percent of the population in the Mekong basin depending for their protein needs on the wild caught fish from the river and its tributaries,” the TERRA note adds.

The upper Mekong dams also block the silt that nourishes the fertile floodplains downstream, says the U.S. based International Rivers Network in an October report.

According to the Phnom Penh-based Mekong River Commission (MRC), the fisheries yield in the lower basin reaches 1.75 million tonnes, or 20 percent of all fish caught from the inland waters of the world.

”People see large dams as obsolete. This is a 100-year-old model,” says Hubbel. ”Technology has gone beyond that, but people in government don’t support what is new.”

Witoon adds that not all countries in the Mekong region will gain equal benefits from the huge projects planned. ”The countries are in different stages of development and that will contribute towards an inequality.”

In fact, TERRA is co-hosting a regional conference this week that aims to explore ”alternatives to centrally-planned large-scale infrastructure development and engineering of rivers”. The Nov. 8-12 meeting will be the first of its kind with participants from communities across the river’s basin.