Bangkok Post
July 25, 2000

An American fish expert says the immediate decommissioning of the Pak Moon Dam will yield a number of benefits that will be enjoyed by a lot more people than just protesting villagers.

For a man who has studied tropical fish in the Moon River since 1985, and in the Chao Phraya and the Mekong since 1970, the answer to the question of how to resolve the dispute over the Pak Moon Dam is as clear as broad daylight: Dr Tyson Roberts says the dam should be pulled down, and there’s no time like the present.

“In view of its evident defects, including extremely poor performance in generating electricity, serious consideration should be given to decommissioning the Pak Moon Dam now,” argued the American ichthyologist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

“True decommissioning means both the physical removal of the dam and restoration of the river as much as possible to the conditions that existed before the installation of the dam,” Dr Roberts said, stressing the job should not be undertaken by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (Egat), which gave birth to the controversial project twelve years ago.

In fact, the American scientist said the Pak Moon Dam’s run-of-river design would make it the relatively easiest and cheapest to dismantle of all the dams in Thailand.

Such a mission would also set an historic precedent in Thailand, where Dr Roberts foresees the urgent need to bring down “all the 49 large hydropower dams in the country” before the end of the century.

The researcher’s bold idea is basically prompted by his concern for the continual decline in natural resources in the entire Mekong region. The trends have already become apparent in upstream areas in mainland China, where he said there was no longer any significant migratory fish, probably due to serious deforestation, dam construction and a high level of sedimentation in the waterways.

The only remaining healthy wild capture fisheries in the Mekong basin today, said Dr Roberts, were restricted to the lower zone, covering the southernmost part of Laos just below Khone Falls, Cambodia, and perhaps Vietnam.

“It is unethical and immoral for the Thai government to cause similar damage to neighbouring countries. The push for large hydropower projects in Laos is a complete disgrace,” the scientist said with frustration.

Back in the 1970s, when Dr Roberts first arrived in Thailand, Ubon Ratchathani had, in his view, the country’s best markets for Mekong wild capture fishes. Unfortunately, construction of the Pak Moon Dam has since wiped out a large number of rapids, the natural habitat for much aquatic life, while the existence of the blocks of concrete across the Moon River continues to make migration of over a hundred species of fish impossible.

For the American ichthyologist, the fish ladder, touted in Egat’s multi-million-baht advertisements, is “virtually useless”. The myriad spawning and feeding patterns of migratory fishes in the tropical rivers, such as in the Moon, have effectively baffled all public relations campaigns for the ladder.

A report by the Fisheries Department, for instance, found only 26 percent of fish species in the Mekong, at a maximum length of 30 centimetres, are able to cross the steep ladder. Dr Roberts said similar structures in Western countries, prototypes of the one at Pak Moon Dam, were built to accommodate a limited number of species with very definite migratory patterns.

“Can you imagine a female fish with half-a-billion eggs swimming up the ladder? As far as I know, no pla buek (giant catfish), the most important migratory species, has ever used it. And yet, that’s the least of the problems.

“Worse, the ladder does not allow fish to move downstream, and thus its life cycle cannot be completed.”

The most worrisome consequence for Dr Roberts was how the dams, regardless of the design, have brought about “unnatural, extremely unfriendly” reservoirs in which no fish can live in.

He said the notion that the Pak Moon Dam has maintained the river’s ebb and flow was false, for the waterways behind the dam have already been deprived of nutrients, the base of the food chain for nearly all riverine fishes.

Problems with such mitigation measures, the fish expert continued, stem from the widespread creed in the prowess of technology to fix things. It seems technocrats, ranging from those at the World Bank down to local officers, have continued to embrace this techno credo relentlessly.

The 12-year-old Pak Moon Dam saga, for example, has generated hefty reports by both national and international agencies praising the project. The World Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department in 1998 insisted the dam did not cause any decline in the fish population in the Moon River, while the Egat resettlement programme for displaced villagers was described as “exceedingly generous”.

On the other hand, in his recent evaluation of the worldwide environmental impact assessment (EIA) industry, Dr Roberts pointed out that the so-called mitigation measures espoused in the EIA reports “seldom” work having been “poorly conceived or not conscientiously carried out”.

“The real reason many EIA reports are kept confidential or secret is because they are so bad that they disgrace the companies producing them and paying for them, and bring disrepute to the projects they endorse, regardless of whether the projects are environmentally-sound or not.”

Accordingly, Dr Roberts deplored the Egat’s dubious manner in pushing for the construction of the Pak Moon Dam. He charged the state enterprise violated the law when it decided to arbitrarily amend the boundaries of the adjacent Kaeng Tana National Park to facilitate the dam’s construction.

Meanwhile, at the height of the Pak Moon Dam controversy, the Fisheries Department has been quiet on the issue of the impact of the dam on aquatic resources, which, the American scientist noted, was a grave mistake.

At present, even if the Pak Moon Dam was to be decommissioned, it was not known whether or when the ecosystem of the Moon River would be fully restored.

But every thousand-kilometre trip needs a first step, Dr Roberts emphasised, and the notorious project of Ubon Ratchathani might as well serve as a test case.

“I’d say no dams should ever be considered in any way, whatsoever, without inclusion of a plan for decommissioning right from the beginning.

“After all, the problems of dams are not just about migratory fishes, nor about an integrity of one watershed. It is the integrity of the global biosphere which is at stake here.

“I am not just an idealist. I am pro-development, pro-economy, pro-civil society, and pro-Thailand. But I am anti-Pak Moon Dam, in particular. If you cannot live satisfactorily within your own environment, you won’t be able to live at all.”

– This article is based in part on Dr Tyson Roberts’ essay titled “A Plea for Pro-environment EIA”, published in the Natural History Bulletin of Siam Society.