When the World Bank decided to finance the Pak Mun dam at the confluence of the Mekong and Mun rivers in Thailand, it faced fierce criticism and relentless opposition due to the project’s predicted environmental damage.

But it went ahead anyway.

To pacify some of the critics, the World Bank loaned out millions of dollars to Thailand’s national power utility for a fish ladder. The ladder, the agency said, would help mitigate damages to the highly migratory and commercially valuable fish species that move from the Mekong to the Mun River every rainy season. The ladder was supposed to help the fish get past the dam to upstream spawning grounds during seasonal migrations.

Too bad the fish ladder was designed for Nordic Salmon – not the hundreds of tropical fish species found in the Mun River. In fact, the river is not home to salmon at all. To make matters worse, the builders installed the ladder at a suspiciously steep angle compared to fish ladders elsewhere. Local residents say that by doing so, the contractors were able to spend less on cement than was originally planned.

Picture of the dam and fish ladder:

The Pak Mun dam was installed in 1994 with a capacity of 136 MW.

The dam was justified by the World Bank as essential for meeting Thailand’s rapidly growing electricity demand. Yet, in 1994, Thailand had more than enough power plants to meet demand – with one-third of its power plants standing idle. Official data shows that the dam’s output today amounts to less than one percent of the country’s peak demand or equivalent to the amount of power consumed by just two large office buildings in the nation’s capital, Bangkok.

Yet, the dam’s construction wiped out a productive fishery – one that tens of thousands of people depended on for food and income. More than 6,000 families lost their subsistence fishing livelihoods while nearly 2,000 families lost their farmland.

After the dam was constructed, villagers decided to setup a museum displaying local artists’ renditions of the riverside communities before the dam, photos of their decade-long campaign to stop the dam, the wide array of fish species never to be seen again in the river and the different kinds of fish nets that now gather dust.

See Probe International’s photo gallery of the museum.

Villagers say the Mun river used to be highly productive – that you could put your rice on to boil for dinner then go catch a few fish and be back before the rice was cooked.

NOTE:

Over the past sixty years Canada and the World Bank have financed far larger and more destructive dams than Pak Mun. For example, the Manantali dam on Africa’s Senegal River is said to have impoverished between 500,000 and 800,000 people living downstream by reducing the natural flood upon which traditional floodplain fishing and farming depended.