SOUTH-EAST ASIA: This Early, Communities Brace for Mekong Floods

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

PHNOM PENH, Feb 23 2003 (IPS) - Four months from now, the rural communities living along the banks of the Mekong River will begin their annual ritual of surviving the torrents of water that come crashing through their lives during the flood season.

For Ngan Savun, who lives in one such village 15 kilometres north of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, the floods mean moving from her current place of work – the cool, airy space below her wooden Cambodian-style house built on stilts – to a confined area, the single-room house itself.

”Living with floods is very hard; there is no room in the house to live and work,” says Ngan, 21, who earns a living weaving brightly coloured fabric for traditional skirts.

Her sentiment is shared by her neighbour, Pech Cham, 35, who during the dry season chops wood and sells it to furniture shops here.

”What I do during the dry season I cannot do during the flood season, selling wood,” says Pech. ”Those who farm in this village, grow ground nuts, fruits, and have cattle also have to change their ways when the river rises.”

These annual adjustments in their lives are things that Ngan and Pech and other villagers living along the banks of South-east Asia’s mightiest body of water cannot ignore.

Generations here are used to living with the swelling of the Mekong’s waters through the June-to-October flood season, which are pivotal for agricultural production in the river’s lower region.

According to the International Rivers Network (IRN), a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), nearly 80 percent of the rice grown in the lower Mekong region needs the water, silt and nutrients provided by the seasonal flooding of the Mekong.

But the increasing severity of the floods in recent years has made the annual floods something to get increasingly worried about.

”Over the last three years, the frequency of severe floods has increased and caused havoc for the countries along the lower Mekong region,” says Sok Sing Im of the Phnom Penh-based Mekong River Commission (MRC), which is pushing cooperation among the countries that share the Mekong.

The extreme floods in 2000 resulted in 800 deaths – 80 percent of which were children and women from the river-based communities – in the Mekong basin. That toll included 347 Cambodian lives.

In 2001, floodwaters caused 61 deaths in Cambodia. Last year, the 2002 floods spared lives but affected 1.4 million people in seven provinces.

The Mekong River flows along a 4,880-kilometre path, from China in the north, to Burma and then snakes through four countries in the lower Mekong region -Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam – till it spills out into the South China Sea.

Over 55 million people live in the Mekong basin and are subject to the annual floods, according to the MRC. For Cambodia, one of Asia’s poorest countries, the havoc wrought by the severe floods adds to its already long list of national woes.

On top of that, a report released by one development agency here is drawing attention to an area hitherto overlooked – the way women in the riverside communities have been affected by the floods.

”We were surprised at the psychological impact the annual floods were having on women. They more than anyone else fear their entire world unravelling due to floods,” says Sharon Wilkinson, country director of CARE International’s Cambodia office.

”Women who cannot access boats, cannot swim, have no shelter are terrified of the rising waters and they worry about losing their children,” adds Wilkinson, whose organisation’s study, ‘Flood Impact on Women and Girls’, is the first gender impact survey of floods in Cambodia.

Victims of floods need to be helped through new policies and programmes, argues Ian Fox, a specialist on flood-related projects at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB).

This becomes more urgent in the wake of ”dams being built by countries in the upper regions of the Mekong that affect countries in the lower Mekong region,” says Fox.

China has completed one of planned eight dams aimed at harnessing the waters of the Mekong upstream. A second dam is due to be commissioned later this year.

According to Fox, it is clear that floods cannot be controlled and that they have to be managed instead. This will require programmes that will allow communities along the Mekong to live and cope with floods, he says.

Thus, during this year’s flood season, the MRC will be providing residents regular information through the Red Cross about rising flood levels, to help them reach safe ground and protect their livelihoods.

This is expected to be more accurate than previous years’ efforts in reading the river – due to a shift in China’s policy toward cooperation on the Mekong.

Last year, China agreed for the first time to share information about the flow of water along the upper Mekong. Till then, experts monitoring the river in the lower Mekong did not know the quantity of water flowing their way from China during the flood season.

China’s decision comes in the wake of steady criticism against its dam construction plans along the Mekong, which activists say will have environmental and economic effects on people living in the four downstream countries.

”China’s information about flood levels will help the people to make their own decisions, about when they should harvest the fields, when they should move their cattle,” says Delia Paul of the MRC.

The speed and frequency of disseminating information on the rising Mekong waters are pivotal given the river’s behaviour at the height of the flood season.

”The water level can change from one to three metres height in a matter of one to two hours,” says Sok of the MRC. ”At times the water can move at 400 cubic metres per second.”

Ngan, the Cambodian weaver, welcomes early warnings to alert her village of dramatic rises in water levels. But she says they can never remove their worries when the flood season comes: ”It is very difficult. We live in fear.”