ENVIRONMENT-LAOS: Mega Dam, Bad News for Elephants

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 13 2006 (IPS) - As construction for a giant hydroelectric dam in Laos enters its second year, one of its major backers, the World Bank, is still to convince environmentalists that it will not affect South-east Asia’s largest concentration of elephants.

The fate of these elephants, estimated to number between 100- 300, has been one of a long list of concerns that green groups raised as the Bank delivered a report, this month, describing work on the Nam Theun Two (NT2) dam as ”progressing satisfactorily.”

”The Bank has not released clear answers about the plans to save the elephants,” Premrudee Daoroung of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA), a Bangkok-based environmental lobby, told IPS. ”We are still waiting for clear clues about what the Bank has in mind. It seems they are not thinking about this seriously.”

A similar complaint was directed at the Bank by International Rivers Network (IRN), a global environmental watchdog based in the U.S. city of Berkeley. ”Many key documents have not yet been completed, including wildlife management plans for critically endangered species living on the Nakai Plateau,” IRN stated in a letter to the Bank.

The Nakai Plateau, which is home to the Laotian elephants and serves as a vital part for their seasonal movements, will be inundated once the 1.3 billion US dollar NT2 power project is completed in June 2008.

The heavily forested plateau, which covers a 450 sq km area, is also home to other animal and bird species that will have to flee once the waters surge across their stomping grounds. These species, some of which are listed as endangered, include the tiger, clouded leopard, barking deer, gibbon, white-winged duck, hornbill, green peafowl and nine species of turtle and tortoise.

The red flags being raised by green groups about the imperilled elephants mirror similar concerns expressed early last year before the Bank’s decision on Mar. 31, 2005, to re-enter the giant dam construction business by offering its services as the political risk guarantor for the NT2 project.

The loss of such large herds, they said, would only add to the rapid dwindling of the Asian elephant population, which, at one time, stood at between 30,000 to 40,000.

For its part, the Bank concedes that the elephant issue is still a work-in-progress. The Nam Theun 2 Power Company (NTPC), which is an international consortium funding the giant dam, has contracted the Wildlife Conservation Society for the ”elephant management programme,” states the Bank.

”Work is currently progressing after some initial delays,” adds the Bank in its 27-page progress report on the first year’s work of the NT2. ”Results of the elephant population assessment, which will form the basis for the management programme, are expected by the middle of the calendar year.”

But the Bank may not be able to get away lightly with such an attitude, since environmentalists are determined to keep the heat on given how symbolic NT2 has become in the debate over the damage mammoth dams have caused to the environment and local communities.

”Nam Theun 2 is the first major dam to be supported by the World Bank since it announced its intention to ramp up lending for large dam and other ‘high-risk’ big infrastructure projects in 2003,” Aviva Imhof, IRN’s campaign director, told IPS. ”(It) is the first cab off the rank and is therefore extremely important project for the World Bank.

”If it fails, it will bode poorly for the Bank’s new strategy,” adds Imhof. ”(But if) successful, it will fuel the fires at the Bank that are calling for more funding for major dam projects.”

During the 1990-95 period, the Bank approved up to two billion dollars for 13 hydropower projects across the world. But that number dropped to less than 600 million dollars for only six projects from 1999 to 2002.

Its entry into Laos sees the Bank taking on a new role, offering security to the international consortium that is building NT2 in case there are moves by the Laos’ communist government to nationalise this private sector development scheme.

But rather than get trapped in that debate, Bank officials are pushing a line of argument that places emphasis on NT2 being a blessing to lift Laos, South-east Asia’s poorest country, out of teeming poverty. ”We see this project not as a hydropower project but as a much broader project – to reduce poverty in Laos PDR (People’s Democratic Republic),” Ian Porter, the Bank’s country director for Laos, told reporters during a press conference here.

NT2 remains ”a project to earn money for a desperately poor country and to benefit the people of Laos PDR,” he added. ”That obviously includes the people directly affected, and we are taking steps to see that the commitments made to them are being fully honoured.”

Laos – ranked as one of the least developed countries (LDCs) in this region, with nearly one-fourth of its 5.6 million population living on less than one dollar a day – is hoping to transform its fortunes when NT2 begins commercial operations in December 2009.

Thailand, Laos’ western neighbour, has already agreed to be the major buyer of the electricity generated from NT2 to meet its ever increasing appetite for energy.

But at what price is such a ‘development’ scheme being constructed, IRN asked the Bank in its letter. Not only is it displacing local communities and causing a loss of income from their traditional livelihoods, but, it adds, the displaced villagers ”will be unable to grow rice on their new irrigated plots due to the poor quality of the soil.”