SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Cross-border Solutions Can Ease Environment Woes

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 20 2004 (IPS) - The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB) is urging countries that share the Mekong River to embrace region-wide measures to protect the terrain’s abundant natural resources.

To back its view, the financial institution released a comprehensive assessment of the Mekong region’s environmental diversity this week. The book, titled ‘Greater Mekong Subregion Atlas of the Environment,’ is co-published by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).

”A holistic approach is needed to manage the environment in the GMS (Greater Mekong Subregion) area,” Jaseem Ahmed of the AsDB told IPS. ”Countries have to build strong institutions to protect and conserve the region’s unique biodiversity.”

According to Ahmed, the leaders of the region – Burma, Cambodia, China’s southern province of Yunnan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam – have already committed in principle to regionwide remedies to problems that cross national borders.

That was at the first summit of leaders from the Mekong region held in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh in 2002, where governments endorsed major development projects for the region.

However, hardly any country in the region has created relevant institutions to give life to the 2002 commitments for a transboundary and regional approach to stall environmental degradation.

”No country in the region has strong environment protection agencies that matches what we have in Europe,” Ahmed said.

The need for such a shift in thinking – away from the habit of governments to view environmental issues with only national interest in mind – is underscored by the 216-page, full-colour GMS atlas.

The uneven spread of forest lands in the Mekong region is one feature the atlas highlights, graphically through the use of figures and satellite photographs. While Burma, Cambodia and Laos enjoyed an abundance of forested terrain – over 50 percent of the land area – Yunnan, Vietnam and Thailand had only close to one-third of forestland.

It is a picture that leaves little room for comfort, states the atlas, since the region’s forests are ”under pressure from population growth and agriculture”.

”The resulting conversion of forest to crop and grazing land, and for transportation infrastructure and settlement has gradually altered the landscape,” it states.

Thailand offers a vivid example of the changing environmental realities. In 1961, this South-east Asian country had 53.3 percent of its land under forest cover, but by 2000 it had dropped to 28.9 percent of forested land – the lowest of any country in the Mekong region.

In the chapter on water resources in the region, the atlas draws attention to the major watersheds affected by declines in forest cover. Of the larger river basins in the region, Thailand’s Chao Phraya, has been singled out as one that is badly affected.

”Already, water flow in the Chao Phraya, which has the smallest catchment area, is causing great concern, with acute water shortages occurring along its length,” states the book.

”As more and more (forest) cover is lost,” it adds, ”the microclimate gradually changes: there is less rainfall for river flow; less water for agriculture, domestic use and power. Thus the watershed has become recognised as the basic unit for development planning.”

The Mekong, which is South-east Asia’s longest river, begins its journey in the mountains of China’s Yunnan province and then snakes over 4,200 kilometres, passing by Burma and through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, till it flows into the South China Sea.

According to the atlas, close to a quarter of a billion people live in the Mekong region, a number that is expected to rise to 290 million by 2015.

In 1992, the AsDB laid the groundwork to integrate the countries into the GMS, with a stress on regional economic cooperation to achieve new growth rates, although development critics say it has been pushing a free-market, infrastructure-heavy agenda that leave community concerns by the wayside.

Still, experts on Mekong-related issues say that the AsDB will not have find it easy to get governments – despite their public pledges – to see the merits that regional cooperation offers in tackling burgeoning environmental problems.

”There is hardly any evidence of national governments in the Mekong region being particularly concerned to take a regional approach to deal with environmental degradation,” said John Dore of the social and environmental research unit at Chiang Mai University. ”National interest always prevails over the regional one.”

What is more, he told IPS, concerns about the environment are still not treated as a priority by governments across the six Mekong countries.

The Manila-based bank will also have to convince environmental and grassroots activists that it means well, given that past AsDB-backed projects have been criticised for either undermining the environment or badly affecting local communities.

”The ADB has a record of promoting big business and the private sector at the expense of the environment,” said Premrudee Daoroung, of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA), a Bangkok-based environmental lobby.

The bank has done little to encourage ”genuine local community participation” to protect the environment, she explained during an interview. ”The Bank refuses to see the different political cultures in the region, where not all local communities are free to express their views.”

Thailand, which is the economic powerhouse in the region, has an open political culture, enabling healthy debate and permitting local communities to protest vigorously to save their environment.

But that is hardly the case in Vietnam and Laos, ruled by Communist parties, for instance, or in military governed Burma.

Bank officials like Ahmed, however, say that a pillar of the bank’s new environmental vision for the GMS is local community participation. It is the ideal way, he argued, to avoid the current situation where ”because of pressure from local communities, the natural resources are under strain”.