A boat navigates the Mekong, whose combined fisheries are valued at 17 billion dollars. Credit: Francisco Anzola/cc by 2.0

By Pascal Laureyn
PHNOM PENH, Nov 14 2017 (IPS)

In Laos, the lush forests are alive with the whines of drills that pierce the air. On the Mekong, a giant concrete wall rises slowly above the trees. The Don Sahong dam is a strong symbol, not only for a power-hungry Asia but also for what critics fear is a disaster in the making.

Landlocked Laos wants to become ‘the battery of Southeast Asia’. The mountainous country with swirling rapids has the ideal geography for hydropower production and Don Sahong is just one of nine dams that Laos wants to build on the mainstream Mekong, claiming that this is the only way to develop the poor country.Millions of people in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam could lose the fish they rely on for food.

But there are serious drawbacks. The Don Sahong dam is being built with little or no consideration of the impact on ecosystems and communities along the Mekong. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Mekong is the second most biodiverse river in the world, after the Amazon. It supports the world’s largest freshwater capture fishery. The Lower Mekong Basin provides a wide variety of breeding habitats for over 1,300 species of fish. But damming the Mekong will block fish migration towards these habitats.

The FAO calculated that about 85 percent of the Lower Mekong Basin’s population lives in rural areas. Their livelihoods and food security is closely linked to the river and is vulnerable to water-related shocks – not just for fishers but for thousands more who sell food products or provide hundreds of related services, says FAO. Millions of people in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam could lose the fish they rely on for food.

Chhith Sam Ath, the Cambodian director of the World Wide Fund (WWF), claimed in The Diplomat that the Don Sahong Dam is “an ecological time bomb”.

Millions of people in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam could lose the fish they rely on for food.
“It threatens the food security of 60 million people living in Mekong basin,” he said. “The dam will have disastrous impacts on the entire river ecosystem all the way to the delta in Vietnam.” This is particularly devastating for downstream Cambodia because more than 70 percent of the protein consumed there comes from fish.

The 260-megawatt dam can also endanger the Irrawaddy dolphins, which are an important source of ecotourism on the Cambodian side of the Mekong. There are only 80 dolphins left. Some live just a few miles from the Don Sahong dam site. WWF warns that damming the Mekong will soon drive all the remaining dolphins to extinction.

A battery worth 800 million dollars

Laos is going forward with the dam all the same, without approval from the Mekong River Commission and in defiance of protests from NGOs and downstream countries. Lao officials say that they cannot stop the country from pursuing its right to development. They argue that they will address some of the concerns with ‘fish-friendly turbines’ and fish ladders. But critics are not convinced that these measures are sufficient.

Downstream, Cambodia is making things much worse. On a Monday morning in September, Prime Minister Hun Sen pushed a symbolic button. For the first time the floodgates of Lower Sesan 2 Dam closed and an artificial lake started to fill. Cambodia now has its own 800-million-dollar battery, built with Chinese funds and knowhow.

In the opening ceremony, Hun Sen praised the technological miracle and the Chinese investors. He pointed out that the need for electricity is growing rapidly. Cambodia has the most expensive electricity in Southeast Asia. That will change with this 400-megawatt dam on the river Sesan, close to its confluence with the Mekong.

Drowning village

In Kbal Romeas, upstream the Sesan, fishermen waited in vain for the yearly migration in May and June. No more fish to catch. The villagers have moved elsewhere, escaping the rising water and increasing poverty. The only reminder of a once lively Kbal Romeas is the roof of a pagoda that seems to float on the empty water.

“The river Sesan is blocked by the dam,” Maureen Harris of NGO International Rivers writes in her report. “That’s a problem for the 200 species that migrate from the Mekong to their breeding grounds in the Sesan.”

The American National Academy of Sciences predicts that the fish population in the Lower Mekong Basin will decline by 9.3 percent. That’s just one dam. More dams are on the drawing table. The Mekong River Commission (MRC), the intergovernmental body charged with coordinating the river’s management, recently released provisional but alarming results of their research. The two finished dams and the 11 scheduled dams will decimate the fish population in the Lower Mekong Basin by half.

The dams would also affect roughly 20 million Vietnamese people in the Mekong Delta, an area that accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. Dams block the flow of sediments, rich with nutrients needed to make soil suitable for cultivation. In Vietnam eroded riverbanks and houses tumbling in the water have become a common spectacle.

The Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen dismissed these environmental concerns, criticising “radical environmentalists”.

“How else can we develop?” he said. “There is no development that doesn’t have an effect on the environment.”

The international NGO Mother Nature mapped the environmental consequences of the Lower Sesan 2 dam. Consequently, the Cambodian government revoked its license. One of the founders, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, has been banned from the country.

Costs outweigh benefits

The dams come at a high environmental cost, imperil food security and risk increasing poverty for millions of people. Moreover, the river’s potential is overestimated by dam developers, says the Mekong River Commission. Dams will meet just 8 percent of the Lower Mekong Basin’s projected power needs. The MRC proposes a ten-year moratorium on dam building. But few governments are listening.

The MRC valued the combined fisheries for the Mekong Basin at 17 billion dollars. Energy from the 13 dams may yield 33.4 billion, according to an international study by Mae Fa Luang University in Chiang Rai. But a denuded river system carries a price tag of 66.2 billion dollars, the same study predicts.

The real costs of hydropower seem to outweigh the benefits. But the projects still go ahead. The thump of jackhammers will become more common. The mother of all rivers will have to face an army of men with safety hats that want to stop her from flowing freely.

A farmer looks out at a flooded paddy field in Laos. Credit: E Souk/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
BANGKOK, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The future of food security in the Mekong region lies at a crossroads, as several development ventures, including the Xayaburi Hydropower Project, threaten to alter fish migration routes, disrupt the flow of sediments and nutrients downstream, and endanger millions whose livelihoods depend on the Mekong River basin’s resources.

Running through China, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos, Thailand and Cambodia to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, this is Asia’s seventh longest transboundary river.

An estimated 60 million people live within the lush river basin, and nearly 80 percent depend on the Lower Mekong’s waters and intricate network of tributaries as a major source of food.

But if all goes according to plan, 88 dams will obstruct the river’s natural course by 2030. Seven have already been completed in the Upper Mekong basin in China, with an estimated twenty more either planned or underway in the northwest Qinghai province, the southwestern region of Yunnan and Tibet.

Construction of the 3.5-billion-dollar Xayaburi Dam on the Lower Mekong in northern Laos is the first of eleven planned dam projects on the main stem of the Mekong River, with nine allocated for Laos and two in Cambodia.

Construction began in 2010 and as of last month the project was 10 percent complete.

At best these development projects will alter the traditional patterns of life here; at worst, they will devastate ecosystems that have thrived for centuries.

Over 850 freshwater fish species call the Mekong home, and several times a year this rich water channel is transformed into a major migration route, with one third of the species travelling over 1,000 kilometres to feed and breed, making the Mekong River basin one of the world’s most productive inland fisheries.

Large-scale water infrastructure development projects such as hydropower dams have already damaged the floodplains in the Lower Mekong and in the Tonlé Sap Lake in Cambodia, affecting water quality and quantity, lowering aquatic productivity, causing agricultural land loss and a 42-percent decline in fish supplies.

This spells danger in a region where fish accounts for 50 to 80 percent of daily consumption and micronutrient intake, Ame Trandem, Southeast Asia programme director for the non-profit International Rivers, told IPS.

Locating alternative protein sources such as livestock and poultry is no easy task and would require 63 percent more pasture lands and more than 17 percent more water.

“Cambodia is the largest fish eating country in the world. Get rid of the fish and you’re going to have serious problems because there is not enough livestock in Cambodia and Laos to compensate for the loss,” Trandem said.

With a total population of over 16 million, the Mekong Delta is known as the ‘rice bowl’ of Vietnam. It nurtures vast paddy fields that are responsible for 50 percent of national rice production and 70 percent of exports.

This low-lying delta depends on a natural cycle of floods and tides, with which Vietnamese farmers have long synchronised their planting and harvesting calendars.

Now, experts like Geoffrey Blate, senior advisor of landscape conservation and climate change for the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Greater Mekong Programme in Thailand, say this delicate ecosystem is vulnerable to changes brought on by global warming and mega development projects.

Rising sea levels and salt water intrusion have already put Vietnamese communities in the Mekong Delta on red alert, “while sediment losses caused by upstream dams will exacerbate these problems. In addition, the increased precipitation and heavier downpours anticipated from climate change may also substantially alter flood regimes in the Delta,” Blate told IPS.

If all the dams are built, experts estimate that 220,000 to 440,000 tonnes of white fish would disappear from the local diet, causing hunger and leading to a rapid decline in rice production.

Electricity over sustainability?

Citing a shortage of energy, Thailand’s leading state-owned utility corporation, EGAT, signed an agreement to purchase 95 percent of the Xayaburi dam’s anticipated 1,285 megawatts (MW) of electricity.

Six Thai commercial banks comprise the financial muscle of the project, while construction is in the hands of Thailand’s CH. Karnchang Public Company Limited, with some support from the Laotian government.

But energy experts like Chuenchom Sangarasri Greacen, author of Thailand’s Alternative Power Development Plan, have poked holes in the claim that the dam is required to meet growing energy needs.

Thailand is a net importer of electricity, but a lot of it is utilised wastefully, she told IPS, adding that countries like Laos and Cambodia have a much more immediate need for electricity: the World Bank estimates that only 84 percent of the population in Laos and 26 percent in Cambodia have access to electricity, compared to 99.3 percent in Thailand.

But instead of developing their own generation capacities, these governments have chosen export projects that profit corporations over people.

“Thailand is creating a lot of environmental, social and food issues for local communities by extending its grid to draw power from beyond our borders,” Greacen said.

Already, 333 families from villages like Houay Souy in north-central Laos, who were moved to make way for the dam, are feeling the first hints of greater suffering to come.

Once a self-sufficient community that generated revenues via gold panning and cultivated their own riverbank gardens to produce rice, fruits and vegetables, villagers are now finding themselves without jobs, very little money and not enough food.

“The villagers’ primary source of food was fishing and agriculture. In their new location, about 17 km away from their old homes, they were given small plots of agricultural land but not enough for their daily consumption needs,” said Trandem.

“Ch. Karnchang never compensated them for lost fisheries, fruit trees or the riverbank gardens that were washed away. Their new homes were built with poor quality wood, which was quickly eaten into by termites, so what little compensation they did receive went to fixing their new homes,” she added.

These families, numbering about five members per household, are now barely surviving on 10 dollars per month and symbolise the gap between so-called poverty alleviation programmes and their impact on the ground.

“The Laos government claims that dams will generate revenue but in reality…projects like Xayaburi basically export benefits and profits away from the host country while smaller projects that are more economically sustainable are being ignored,” says Greacen.

She believes the Laotian government should explore small-scale renewable energy projects like biomass and micro-hydro plants that would attract local investment and directly serve local populations.

Blate also suggested building diversion canals for smaller dams, rather than obstructing the main stem of the Mekong River.

Migrants employed as construction workers in Thailand receive little training or safety equipment. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
CHIANG MAI, Thailand, May 21 2013 (IPS)

On the outskirts of the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, a group of twelve migrant families lives in a makeshift camp comprised of houses constructed from scrap metal.

They share three toilets between them, and each home consists of nothing more than a single room, whose flimsy walls and roof provide little privacy, and are no match for the heavy monsoon rains that lash northern Thailand between the months of May and November.

Sounds of splashing water fill the air as both male and female migrants, returning from a long day’s work, unwind with a shower in the rudimentary, open-air structures that contain nothing more than a rap connected to a water tank.

Most of these workers are employed on a residential construction site just north of here, where they pour cement, plaster walls, build roofs or install electrical wiring from seven in the morning until six in the evening, seven days a week. They do not have much to show for these gruelling hours on the job, returning home with as little as six dollars a day.

One of this shantytown’s residents, Nang Soi Sat, tells IPS the long working hours and paltry income are not even her biggest concerns: she is more worried about maintaining her legal status in the face of multiple challenges.

Thailand is home to an estimated 2.5 million migrant workers. The country’s economic boom – which has seen an 18.9 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) since 2011 – relies heavily on a constant influx of labour from neighbouring countries. Over 82 percent of the workers hail from Myanmar (Burma), 8.4 percent from Laos and 9.5 percent from Cambodia.

Those from Myanmar say ethnic strife and civil conflict sent them fleeing in search of better opportunities in the region. A network of garment and furniture factories housed in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that dot the Thai-Myanmar border quickly absorb incoming migrants to work for a pittance.

Other key areas of employment for migrants include the seafood and agricultural sectors.

For migrants like Sai Sun Lu, the search for better opportunities did not end with his arrival here. Originally from Myanmar’s volatile Shan State, Lu works over nine hours a day at a site in Chiang Mai, constructing high rise buildings that will likely be converted into commercial centres, residential condos or offices, without a single day off.

He tells IPS he did not want to come to Thailand, but was forced to as a result of intense fighting in his home. His hopes for greener pastures on the other side of the border have been dashed and he now finds himself living in a kind of daily nightmare, toiling in what rights groups have called “appalling” conditions.

According to the U.S. State Department’s report on migration and refugees, Thailand ranks alongside some of the worst offenders of migrants’ rights, including Afghanistan, Chad, Iran and Niger.

Because migrant labourers are typically unskilled, with little awareness of occupational safety, they are easy prey for employers looking to cut corners by dismissing safety concerns.

In the construction sector, inadequate training in the proper use of machinery and a lack of protective equipment such as body harnesses or guardrail systems pose a grave threat to those who work on buildings as high as 27 to 69 stories.

On Sai Sun Lu’s construction site, “there have been many accidents and deaths. Some workers have slipped and fallen from the high rises but we receive very little or no compensation,” he said.

“As Burmese we have to be extra careful because if we make any mistakes then our employers can terminate our work without any explanation.”

Fear of this last consequence is, for many workers, second only to the fear of death, and a very common one among migrants from Myanmar who account for 75 percent of Thailand’s one million undocumented workers, according to the Institute for Population and Social Research at Mahidol University.

The 2008 National Verification Programme (NVP) was intended to legalise the status of incoming migrants and provide them with basic protections under Thai labour laws, such as access to social security schemes, official work accident compensation and the ability to apply for driving licences.

However, rights activists contend that the NVP’s registration fees are “extortionate”, often requiring three times the average worker’s monthly salary of between 100 and 167 dollars.

According to this year’s World Report, published annually by Human Rights Watch (HRW), Thai employers frequently seize migrant workers’ documents, thus rendering them bonded labourers, while government policies – like the Thai cabinet’s 2010 resolution to fine employees if their papers carry outdated information – impose severe restrictions on migrant workers’ ability to change jobs.

Even migrants with all their legal papers in hand often go to pains to avoid encounters with the police for fear of being harassed, physically abused, or arrested.

In desperation, many have turned to personal networks of friends and family members to gain access into the country.

In rural Myanmar, where most migrants come from, informal transporters linked to smugglers with networks along the border facilitate entry into Thailand. This system has led to the proliferation of so-called recruiters, or agents, who charge exorbitant fees in exchange for providing such services as remitting money, establishing communication channels between families, or securing employment.

Following allegations of rampant corruption among recruitment agencies, the Labour Ministry of Myanmar recently banned 12 agencies from sending migrant workers to Thailand, according to an internal memo obtained by ‘The Myanmar Times’.

Earlier this month, Myanmar’s Deputy Labour Minister Myint Thein assured labour activists and migrants that the state was doing everything possible to rein in illegal actors and ensure safe, affordable passage between the two countries. It has a vested interest in doing so: a 2010 ILO report found that the average migrant worker in Thailand sent home about 1,000 dollars every month, with total remittances from Thailand accounting for about five percent of Myanmar’s annual GDP.

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, May 17 2013 (IPS)

In December 2011, 159 governments and major international organisations recognised the central role of civil society in development and promised to create an “enabling” operating environment for the non-profit sector.

Mandeep Tiwana, policy and advocacy manager of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Credit: Mandeep Tiwana

Despite the tall talk at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, today NGOs, trade unions, faith based groups, social movements and community based organisations working to expose rights violations and corruption remain in a state of siege in many parts of the world.

Reports by U.N. officials and respected civil society organisations show that false prosecutions and murderous attacks on activists are rife and threatening to derail international development objectives even as we debate a new framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015.

In fact, moves are being championed by some governments to limit civil society participation at high-level meetings of the U.N. General Assembly through a process whereby states can issue politically motivated objections to the inclusion of particular NGOs in key discussions.

Unfortunately, legal restrictions on free speech, formation of civic organisations and the right to protest peacefully appear to be on the rise despite the rhetoric of engaging civil society in global decision making forums.

In many countries civil society groups are being prevented from accessing funding from international sources, as highlighted by the U.N.’s special expert on freedom of assembly and association in his latest report.

In Russia, non-profit advocacy groups receiving international funding are being subjected to intrusive inspections to ensure compliance with a controversial law that requires NGOs to register under the highly offensive nomenclature of “foreign agents”, or face sanctions.

A draft law currently pending in Bangladesh seeks to implement a cumbersome approval process for civil society organisations receiving foreign funding, in an attempt to discourage criticism of the government.

Egypt is mulling over a new law that would allow intelligence and security agencies to exert control over independent civil society groups.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s most prolific blogger is serving an 18-year sentence for writing about the implications of the Arab Spring for his country. A respected Laotian activist is missing after he criticised state-sponsored displacement of local communities.

In Saudi Arabia, founders of the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights have been handed 10 and 11-year sentences for “breaking allegiance to the King.” China continues to incarcerate dissident writers calling for democratic reform, including Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiobo.

The situation is alarming in fragile and conflict-affected states. As the civil war rages on in Syria, a number of peaceful civil society activists and journalists are being imprisoned and persecuted in violation of international human rights law.

The actions of Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups have become so murderous that the country is now the deadliest place in the world for trade unionists.

Women’s rights activists challenging patriarchy and religious fundamentalism in Pakistan are gunned down with frightening regularity, while activists from Sri Lanka and Bahrain voicing concerns at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva often face reprisals upon return to their home countries.

In Cameroon and Uganda activists seeking to advance gay rights are not only socially ostracised but also subjected to death threats on a regular basis to prevent them from carrying out their work.

Even in so-called mature democracies, expressing dissent remains an activity fraught with negative consequences. A section of the environmental group Forest Ethics Canada decided to give up its charitable status, including tax advantages, in order to protect itself from intrusive inspections after being blamed by the conservative government of “obstructing” the country’s economic development.

Julian Assange, founder of the activist website WikiLeaks, continues to be hounded for his exposé of U.S. diplomatic cables and, arguably, doing what most investigative journalists do.

In the United Kingdom, the practice of police spies penetrating the environmental movement has prompted a sharp rebuke from the U.N., whose expert on freedom of assembly and association, Maina Kiai, expressed “deep concern” in January about police officers infiltrating non-violent groups who were not engaged in any criminal activities.

As evidence from CIVICUS’ State of Civil Society Report 2013 shows, promises made in Busan about creating an “enabling” environment for CSOs were ignored as soon as the proverbial ink had dried.

With discussions on the post 2015 development agenda well underway, influential civil society groups are urging the U.N.’s High Level Panel to explicitly recognise the centrality of an enabling environment for civil society in any new formulation of internationally agreed development goals.

While politicians are currently preoccupied with kick-starting or maintaining economic growth, there is a real danger that civil society’s right and ability to engage decision makers in various forums will be further limited.

If global development goals are to succeed, civil society needs to be able to operate free from fear of reprisals for advancing legitimate if uncomfortable concerns. After all, civil society groups contribute substantially to development strategies and help find innovative solutions to complex developmental challenges.

More importantly, they help ensure the representation of a wide range of voices, in particular those of the vulnerable and marginalised in development debates. Perhaps this is why they are being persecuted.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Fishermen's boats on the Mekong River in northern Laos, where the building of a controversial dam is planned. Credit: Irwin Loy/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 6 2012 (IPS)

The U.S. government is directly cautioning the Laotian government following Monday’s announcement that the latter will move forward with contentious construction plans for a massive hydroelectric dam on the Mekong River.

“The extent and severity of impacts from the Xayaburi dam on an ecosystem that provides food security and livelihoods for millions are still unknown,” warned the U.S. State Department on Tuesday. “We are concerned that construction is proceeding before impact studies have been completed.”

The 3.5-billion-dollar Xayaburi dam has long been opposed by environmentalists, downstream communities and legal scholars, while the World Bank recently announced sanctions against a Finnish company that approved a disputed environmental assessment in favour of the project.

A major 2011 report by the pan-regional Mekong River Commission expressed concern over several areas in need of further review, and the Laotian government has stated that it would proceed on the Xayaburi project only once those concerns were ameliorated.

However, at the current summit of the inter-regional Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in the Laotian capital, Vientiane, the government made a surprise announcement that it would be moving forward immediately, with groundbreaking at the dam site slated for Wednesday.

“We would hope that senior government officials and heads of state at the Asia-Europe Meeting would express in the strongest possible terms their objections to the Lao government proceeding with the project,” Aviva Imhof, campaigns director with International Rivers, an environment watchdog, told IPS.

“In addition, we would hope that donors to Laos’s electricity and infrastructure sectors, such as the Asian Development Bank and the Japanese government, would reconsider their ongoing development assistance to a government that refuses to comply with its international obligations.”

Tuesday’s statement from the U.S. State Department was unusually direct, cautioning that the United States’ “own experience has made us acutely aware of the economic, social and environmental impacts that large infrastructure can have over the long-term”.

While the U.S. does not say that it opposes the project outright, the State Department highlights that the Mekong River Commission’s members, based in Vientiane, have yet to reach consensus on whether the project should continue. The government urged its Laotian counterpart to “uphold its pledge to work with its neighbours in addressing remaining questions regarding Xayaburi”.

The statement comes a year after a unanimous resolution was passed by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee “calling for the protection of the Mekong River Basin and for delaying mainstream dam construction along the river”.

First of a ‘cascade’

As currently planned, the Xayaburi project would consist of a 1,260 megawatt hydroelectric installation northwest of Vientiane. While there are already three operational dams (with two more under construction) on the narrow northern section of the Mekong that falls within China, the Xayaburi would be the first such project after the river enters the plains and becomes the wide, slow-moving waterway that is central to the lives of tens of millions of Southeast Asians.

Most likely, the dam’s construction would also ease the way for the dozen additional dams that the Mekong River Commission says are currently under consideration along the river.

Under regional agreements, none of these can go forward without consent from the rest of the affected countries. Yet despite a 2011 decision among those countries that additional work was necessary before the Xayaburi project should be allowed to proceed, the Laotian government has quietly continued to oversee extensive and expensive groundwork.

“Laos said it would cooperate with neighbouring countries, but this was never genuine,” Ame Trandem, Southeast Asia programme director for International Rivers, said Tuesday. “The international community should not let the Lao government get away with such a blatant violation of international law.”

Trandem is calling on Western donors as well as the governments of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia to take a “firm stand” against the recent decision.

“The Xayaburi Dam is the first of a cascade of devastating mainstream dams that will severely undermine the region’s development efforts,” she said.

“The food security and jobs of millions of people in the region are now on the line. None of Vietnam and Cambodia’s environmental and social concerns have been taken seriously. Laos has never even collected basic information about the ways that people depend on the river, so how can it say that there will be no impacts?”

Speaking with journalists on Monday, Viraphonh Viravong, the Laotian deputy minister of energy and mining, brushed aside such criticism, saying simply that his government had “addressed most of the concerns”. Construction on an initial diversionary dam should be finished by the middle of next year.

23,000 megawatts

Laos today is a nominally socialist country ruled by one military-backed party, and it remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in Asia. Yet its hydroelectric potential – which the World Bank estimates at 23,000 megawatts, just a tiny percentage of which has thus far been developed – has long been seen as the country’s most significant opportunity to fund its own development.

For this reason, the longstanding opposition to the Xayaburi project has undoubtedly frustrated the country’s political leadership. The dam’s construction is being bankrolled by a Thai company, and current plans would have almost all of its 1,260 megawatts be sold directly to Thailand.

Yet despite the substantial profits projected for the Laotian government, several studies have highlighted significant economic and social costs, including hundreds of millions of dollars in projected lost agricultural and fishery opportunities all the way to the river’s mouth in Vietnam.

Potentially affected communities have put together several petitions to the governments in Vientiane and Bangkok, asking that the Xayaburi project be halted. The Mekong River Commission has gone still farther, suggesting in 2010 that all dam work on the river be subjected to a moratorium of at least a decade, to allow for greater study of the potential impact of such work.

In 2011, the Laotian government hired a Finnish company, the Pöyry Group, to ascertain whether the Xayaburi proposal complied with the Mekong River Commission’s requirements. To the surprise of many observers, the company found that the project was in compliance and advised the government to continue – though it also suggested dozens of additional surveys and studies.

In August, the World Bank announced that it was sanctioning the Pöyry Group for impropriety (though not specifically for its work in Laos). Nonetheless, critics warn that the Laotian government is now proceeding based almost solely on the problematic Pöyry assessment.

Disarmament activists and former U.S. ambassadors are urging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to increase U.S. aid to Laos to clear millions of tonnes of unexploded ordinance (UXO) left by U.S. bombers on its territory during the Indochina War during her brief visit to the country Wednesday.

The visit, scheduled to last only a few hours on a hectic eight-nation tour by Clinton designed in part to underline the Barack Obama administration’s “pivot” from the Middle East to Asia, will nonetheless be historic. No sitting U.S. secretary of state has visited Laos since 1955.

Sources here said Clinton is considering a 100-million-dollar aid commitment to support bomb-clearing efforts over a 10-year period. Such a commitment would more than double the nearly 47 million dollars Washington has provided in UXO assistance since 1997 when it first began funding UXO programmes in Laos.

“While Secretary Clinton’s visit celebrates a promising future for U.S.-Lao relations,” said Amb. Douglas Hartwick, who served as Washington’s envoy in Vientiane from 2001 to 2004, “I hope she also affirms to the Lao people America’s steadfast commitment to help Laos and the international community to resolve this legacy once and for all by clearing Lao land of deadly bombs.”

Hartwick was one of six former ambassadors to Laos who last year publicly urged Clinton to travel to Laos and adopt the 10-year, 100-million-dollar UXO proposal – originally put forward by a Washington-based organisation, Legacies of War – on her way to or from last year’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Bali, Indonesia.

Administration policymakers, however, evidently decided to put off the trip until this year’s regional summit in Cambodia, Laos’s next-door neighbour.

Over the past year, Washington has intensified its courtship of China’s southern neighbours, notably Burma with which relations have improved dramatically since Clinton’s visit there – also the first by a secretary of state since 1955 – last December. Before arriving in Phnom Penh late Wednesday, she spent Tuesday in Hanoi before traveling on to Vientiane.

Between 1964 and 1973, more than 2.5 million tonnes of U.S. munitions were dropped on Laos – more than was dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World War II – making what was then the poorest country in Southeast Asia the most heavily bombed nation per capita in recorded history.

With some 2.5 million inhabitants at the time, an average of one tonne of bombs was dropped for every man, woman and child in Laos.

Up to 30 percent of the bombs failed to detonate. Their remnants not only cause several hundred casualties of a year, but also effectively prevent Laotian farmers from cultivating hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile land.

Some 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by UXO over the past 40 years, according to Legacies of War. And an estimated one-third of Lao land is still littered with the deadly ordinance.

Unlike with Vietnam and Cambodia, Washington never severed diplomatic relations with the Communist government that eventually took power in 1975. But it nonetheless took 17 years – until 1992 – for the U.S., whose top priority initially was to account for the nearly 600 U.S. servicemen killed or missing in action in Laos, to fully normalise ties. Normal trade relations were formalised only seven years ago.

Washington first provided funding for UXO clearance in 1997 under President Bill Clinton and maintained aid at an average annual rate of about 2.6 million dollars. In 2009, it rose to 3.5 million dollars and then to five million dollars in 2010. Led by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, Congress approved nine million dollars for this year.

The Senate Appropriations Committee has recommended that 10 million dollars be approved for 2013, but that amount could be a harder sell in the Republican-led House of Representatives.

Proponents of the aid are hoping that a public commitment by Clinton will enhance the chances for Congressional approval for the 10 million dollars and a longer-term commitment which they believe will be necessary to leverage additional resources from other donor countries and agencies.

“The people who continue to suffer from the bombings are ordinary Lao villagers,” said Channapha Khamvongsa, Legacies’ executive director. “We are hopeful that after witnessing the human impact of UXO in Laos first-hand, the Secretary will re-affirm the U.S. commitment to helping Laos solve this problem once and for all.”

But the challenge remains formidable. While more than a million UXO are estimated to have been destroyed or cleared to date, it is believed that nearly 80 million UXO are still scattered across the country.

“UXO/mine action is the absolute pre-condition for the socio-economic development of (Laos),” according to a two-year-old study by the U.N. Development Programme which has worked with the government of Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong to develop a plan to focus clearance efforts on high-priority areas.

“(E)conomic opportunities in tourism, hydroelectric power, mining, forestry and many other areas of activity considered main engines of growth for the Lao (Peoples Democratic Republic) are restricted, complicated and made more expensive,” according to UNDP which has estimated the funding needs to significantly reduce the UXO problem in Laos at 30 million dollars a year sustained over a 10-year period.

While the U.S. is the single largest donor to the UXO programme, other donors, notably Japan, the European Commission, Ireland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, and Australia, as well as U.N. agencies, have also contributed to the programme.

Led chiefly by the UXO funding, Washington’s total bilateral aid programme to Laos has grown from about five million dollars in 2007 to 12 million dollars for the current year. In addition to the nine million dollars for the UXO programme, Washington has focused aid on the health sector and counter-narcotics.

In a related development Monday, Human Rights Watch urged Clinton to halt all aid to the Somsanga drug detention centre until the Lao government conducts a full and independent investigation into human rights abuses allegedly committed against detainees there, including children.

In March, 12 U.N. agencies also called for Somsanga and other drug detention centres in Laos to be closed.

“The Lao government and the U.S. State Department claim that Somsanga is a modern healthcare centre,” said Joe Amon, HRW’s health and human rights director. “But a decade of U.S. funding hasn’t changed the fact that it’s a brutal and inhumane detention centre where the Lao government puts ‘undesirable’ people.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.