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Chinese dams, channel blasting may spell disaster for mighty Mekong River

By Denis Gray
Associated Press
1 November 2002

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Developers advertise the Mekong River as "Asia's last frontier."

Others warn of social and environmental disaster as China dams and blasts one of the world's great untamed rivers, altering the flow to millions of people downstream who depend upon the river.

"The Chinese hydropower dams, channelization for navigation, and heavy commercial shipping will kill the river," said Tyson Roberts of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "The dams will be a menace to livelihoods, property, and life in all of the downstream countries."

Even in China, some critical voices are rising. "On an international river, no country should be selfish. It should consider impacts on other countries and the whole river," said Xu Xioagang, an academic and environmental activist who has studied the effects of dams on Chinese communities.

Chinese authorities argue that reshaping the Mekong will have minimal impact downstream and may be beneficial in some cases. Dams will ease the annual cycles of flooding and water shortages in the Mekong Basin while deeper navigation channels are sure to foster regional trade and help alleviate poverty, they said.

"Development of the Mekong River is a joint decision of all the related countries. Damage and negative impacts are much smaller compared to the benefits for a larger population," said Deng Jiarong, the Chinese official in Yunnan who is in charge of Mekong River affairs.

Further debate, as well as protests by nongovernmental organizations, are expected when leaders of the Greater Mekong Subregion meet Nov. 3 in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The GMS, launched a decade ago to promote development, includes Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and China's Yunnan province.

Most people in this region agree that the stakes are high and the pace of development is accelerating. The basin is home to more than 60 million people, mostly low income but largely self-sufficent farmers and fishers who depend on the river's rich sediment for riverside cultivation and on its cornucopia of fish.

After Brazil's Amazon, the Mekong is the world's most biodiverse inland waterway, with an estimated 1,245 species found in its waters. It provides 80 percent of the protein needs of people who live in the basin.

Wars and geographical remoteness kept much of the 4,880-kilometer-long (3,030-mile) Mekong isolated. Its source in the high plateau of Tibet was only discovered in 1994. The river was bridged for the first time the same year when a span went up between Laos and Thailand. And in 1996 China completed the first dam, Manwan, across the Mekong's main stream.

Now, some $40 billion worth of industrial, energy, transport, and tourism projects are set to change forever the lives, cultures and environments of millions.

The changes don't come from China alone. Dams are already up on the Mekong's three major tributaries, in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Intensive application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, waste discharges from urban areas, widespread logging, and the use of explosives and other nontraditional fishing methods in several countries already are degrading the ecosystem. Population pressures — the basin paopulation is expected to grow to 100 million people by 2025 — are expected to take an increasingly heavy toll.

"Every villager living along the Mekong River now says the same thing: 'There are fewer and fewer fish to catch,'" said David Hubbel, who works with an environmental group based in Thailand, Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance.

"It's the rise and fall of the water and the movement of fish that gives the people food throughout the basin," Hubbel told reporters recently. High waters in the rainy season allow fish to swim up tributaries to spawning grounds; low waters in the dry season permit farmers to grow crops on land newly fertilized by river silt.

Attempts to re-engineer and regulate this vast but delicate annual cycle could spell disaster, many experts warn. Chinese dams may have worsened this year's severe floods in several riverine countries experts said. Faced with rain-swollen reservoirs, the Chinese released more water than normal into a river already high from heavy local downpours. Deaths and vast losses in crops and homes were reported in Cambodia, Thailand, Yunnan province and elsewhere in the basin.

The Chinese-initiated project to blast rapids, shoals, and reefs in order to allow ships of greater tonnage to ply the Mekong is another point of controversy. The first phase, which has started, would clear the river from the China-Myanmar border some 300 kilometers (186 miles) into Laos. Deng, the Chinese official, insisted the impact of blasting would be short-lived and that the damming would boost fishing in downstream countries and reduce flood damage by stabilizing water levels.

An evaluation sponsored by The Mekong River Commission, a river basin authority based in Phnom Penh, has criticized the environmental impact study for the project as "fundamentally flawed," its findings simply "speculation." The study, completed in just six months, was carried out by a joint experts group from China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. The river commission asked Australia's Monash Environmental Institute for the evaluation.

Critics of the blasting say the fast flow of water would cause riverbank erosion and the destruction of reefs would kill off prime breeding grounds for fish. "China's (moves) will turn the Mekong into a biologically degraded, badly polluted, dying river like the Yangtze and other big rivers of China," said Tyson, a fisheries expert with the Washington D.C.–based institute. "China will not be able to regulate the Mekong any more than she can regulate the Yangtze, Europe can regulate the Danube, or the U.S.A. can regulate the Mississippi."

Officials in the region have muted their responses to China despite criticism by academics and villagers in downstream countries. Southeast Asian countries don't want a confrontation with China. But Thailand has at least temporarily halted blasting of its section of the river, while Laos is skeptical. "Millions of Laotians rely on the Mekong. Their lives will be affected by so many changes on the river," the Laotian ambassador to Thailand, Hiem Phommachanh has said.

Yu, who heads the Chinese nongovernmental organization Green Watershed, believes China is unlikely to cease building dams, which it began without consulting its neighbors and without assessing the impact downstream. China may construct a cascade of as many as eight dams on the river in Yunnan province. The second one, Dachaoshan, has been completed, and a third, Xiowan, is scheduled for commissioning in 2012. At the equivalent of 100 stories high, it would be among the world's tallest dams.

Feasibility studies are under way for two others, and there is talk about another three dams. Yu says that domestic politics as well as China's seemingly unquenchable need for water and hydropower, drive the dam building projects on the Mekong and elsewhere.

China must increase its electricity output by 5 to 6 percent each year until 2020 to meet economic goals. And enriching relatively poor provinces like Yunnan through hydropower is tied to China's "Go West" policy, an effort to close a potentially destabilizing gap between booming areas of eastern China and the have-nots of the west.

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dewdrop

|09-01-2008 19:09:53

So almost 6 years ago a bell on China's inconsiderate acts was already rung.
6 years now have passed and 4,5..6 dams were and to be built!!
In the verge of earthwake and earthwake aftershock, people's sense of danger is clearly right if one day one or more of those Chinese's selfish works were knocked down and then more lives would be lost and distressed in the maniac current downstream, not to mention a great deal of Chinese pollution floating down like it is in the case of the Three Gorges dam. This might give some clue as to where fishes have gone.

Despite Beijing's mouthpiece, China's growth is really a security threat in every sense.

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