Financial Times
November 20, 2002

Pressure for dams has pitched poor ethnic minorities against industrial centres.

The river the Chinese call Lancang used to flow lazily through Xishuangbanna, a quiet rural region of China that is home to a number of ethnic minorities who spill comfortably over the porous borders with Laos and Burma.

From its source high on the Tibetan Plateau, the Mekong River, as it is known to the rest of the world, is one of the most bio-diverse inland waterways in the world. It flows 4,880km through some of the poorest regions in Asia, a basin inhabited by millions of small  subsistence farmers who depend on the river’s bounty for their survival.

Today China and the Asian Development Bank see the river as an asset in the region’s modernisation. Construction has already become of a string of hydro-electric dams that will eventually send electricity to energy-hungry industrial centres in China’s southern  Guangdong province and around Shanghai.

It is part of China’s “Go West” policy, which aims to ensure that the benefits of the country’s roaring growth are not limited to the coastal regions, but also spread towards more remote provinces. Yet China’s southern neighbours – Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam – are deeply worried about the consequences of the ambitious
plans to develop their shared waterway.

Thai environmental activists and experts in global research institutes warn that the huge Chinese projects will in effect “kill” the river -by destroying its fragile ecology, including the prime breeding grounds for the fish that now nourish millions of people.

Such fears have turned the Mekong – once identified with America’s military adventures in Indochina – again into a battleground, the latest front in environmentalists’ global war against big dams.

“The Mekong is our mother and will be so forever,” says Niwat Roikaew, an activist from the small Thai town of Chiang Kong, which sits on the bank of Mekong, facing Laos. “We must fight for the life of the river and for our communities’ future.”

However, even as they fret about how the massive Chinese dams will affect them, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have erected and are planning their own smaller dams on some of the Mekong’s tributaries. This has muted their complaints.

“If they start criticising dams in China that puts them in a bind, because they want to build their own dams,” says Dave Hubbel, an activist with Terra, a Thailand-based environmental group. “They are just quietly hoping somebody will stop China, but that nobody will stop them.”

The Mekong’s bounty that is now under threat includes sediment-rich soil that allows for highly productive riverside cultivation in the dry season, and more than 1,200 species of fish, including the giant Mekong Catfish, which many along the river revere.

China is already constructing the 292-metre high Xiaowan hydroelectric dam, which will cost Rmb22.2bn ( $2.7bn, Euros 2.66bn, £1.7bn) and is due to be completed in 2012. Second in size only to the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river, Xiaowan is the third of eight dams Beijing plans to build on the river.

Beijing is also pushing a scheme to dynamite the many rapids and shoals that have long hindered navigation of the Mekong. Burma, Laos and Thailand have all signed up to the programme – which will enable large cargo ships to ply the river – and some blasting has already begun. China says it has made a “comprehensive” study of the Xiaowan’s
environmental consequences, and insists the impact of the dam – and the blasting of the rapids – will be negligible.

But activists contend the dams and the blasting will submerge the homes and farmlands – and otherwise destroy the livelihoods – of the regions’ weakest, most vulnerable people, while profiting more affluent people.

“The benefit and the cost are in different places,” said Xu Xiaogang, an academic and environmental activist in China.

An independent evaluator has condemned the Chinese-led environmental study for the rapid-blasting project as “fundamentally flawed”, and said its findings were mere “speculations”.

Activists have recently won support from an unexpected quarter:

Thailand’s army. The military is worried that dynamiting the rapids of the Mekong – which serves as the border between Thailand and Laos – could hasten erosion along river banks, influencing the location of a boundary that has never been properly delineated. The army has ordered a halt to some of the blasting until the border issue can be settled.

But in the long-term, China, is unlikely to face much resistance from its poorer neighbours.

“You are talking about negotiation between unequal partners who are trying to find an equitable solution,” said Rajat M. Nag, director of the ADB Mekong Division. However, he insists that there will be give and take. “This will be a matter of goodwill, bargaining power and trade-offs.”