Thousands of villagers harmed by the World Bank-financed Pak Mun dam are demanding that the dam’s gates be opened year-round so that fish can return to northeast Thailand’s Mun River.

(Above: The latest protest against the Pak Mun dam began last March and continues today, more than 500 days later.)

In response to villagers’ protests and pressure from citizens groups worldwide, the Thai cabinet announced in July that the dam’s gates should be opened for four months of the year. But whether the state utility that owns and operates the dam, EGAT, will comply with the cabinet’s recommendation remains unclear.

The villagers’ demands are inspired in part by the North American experience, where a growing number of uneconomic dams are successfully retired each year, and riverine communities then work to restore lost fisheries and tourist-based livelihoods.

Their cause received a boost earlier this year by the World Commission on Dams, a global fact-finding body, which confirmed what the World Bank has long denied: In its special review, the WCD found that the 136-megawatt Pak Mun dam is an economic failure. The dam, completed in 1994, barely generates 40 megawatts in the high-demand but dry months of April and May and provides zero irrigation benefits to local farmers. Even in the rainy season, EGAT can’t always operate the turbines because the swollen Mekong River backs up into the Mun tributary, reversing its flow, making it impossible to spin the turbines. That the Mun River changes direction is a well-known phenomenon to local villagers but it was overlooked by the bank and EGAT engineers.

The commission also reported that 56 fish species in the Mun River have disappeared since the dam was built; the fish ladder doesn’t work, and fish catches have declined by 60 to 80 per cent, amounting to economic losses of about US$1.4 million annually. Although the report stopped short of making any concrete recommendations about compensation or the dam’s future, the economic indictment of Pak Mun has strengthened the villagers’ case for opening the dam’s gates permanently. To support the villagers’ demands, Probe International published its economic arguments for decommissioning the Pak Mun dam in the Bangkok-based newspaper The Nation.