SE Asian Countries Design Tourniquets to Cut Off Their Own Lifestream

Condensed from "Dams on Mekong river generate discord as environment suffers," by Yoolim Lee, published in the Phnom Penh Post, Oct. 29, 2010.  All text below is copyright Lee/the Phnom Penh Post.

     The Mekong river sparkles in the early morning sun as Somwang Prommin, a stocky fisherman wearing a worn-out black T-shirt and shorts, starts the motor of his boat.  As the tiny craft glides on the river's calm surface in the northeastern Thai district of Chiang Khong, Somwang points to a nearby riverbank.  Three days ago, he says, the water levels there were 3 meters higher.
     The Mekong, which translates roughly as "mother of the waters" in the Thai langauge, has become unpredictable since China started building hydropower dams and blasting the rapids upstream, according to Somwang, 36, who has been fishing for a living since he was 8 years old.
     In August 2008, devestating floods reduced his catches and income.  Early this year, he witnesses the most severe drought in his life.
     Tens of millions of people are experiencing similar currents of change along the 4,800-kilometer-long Mekong, which flows through six countries and is Southeast Asia's longest river.
     The Mekong and its tributaries provide food, water and transportation to about 60 million people in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.  Their livelihood is now threatened as their governments turn to hydroelectric dams along the river to generate power and create revenue.
     [Proposed] projects will have a disastrous impact on Cambodia and Vietnam, says Milton Osborne, a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney and a historian who wrote The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future.  "What the Chinese are doing shows a selfish lack of concern for the serious damage their dams will ultimately do to the downstream countries," Osborne says.
     Downriver, other countries are pursuing their own objectives.  Laos has proposed building 10 hydropower plants on the mainstream of the Mekong that will export electricity and transform the nation -- one of Asia's poorest, with a per-capita gross domestic product of US$886 -- into what the government calls "the battery of Southeast Asia."
     Cambodia plans to build two dams near the border with Laos.  In all, 12 dams are planned by the countries below China along the mainstream of the Mekong.  The dams would transform 55 percent of the downstream river into a reservoir, making it into a series of impoundments with slow water movement.  [A] report prepared by an independent consulting firm in Australia recommended that the [Mekong River Commission] delay any decision on constructing the dams for 10 years.
     The dams "have the portential to create transboundary impacts and international tensions," the report says.  "One dam across the lower Mekong mainstream commits the river to irrevocable change."
     Chinese officials say they are aiding the environment, not harming it.  Building dams "is an important step taken by the Chinese government to vigorously develop renewable and clean energy and contribute to the global endeavor to counter climate change," Song Tao, the country's vice minister of foreign affairs, told a summit meeting of the MRC in April.