Dams put Mekong on knife's edge

Dams put Mekong on knife's edge

Reuters
Singapore

China's damming of the Mekong river to help power its economy
could pose a grave threat within a decade to the livelihoods of
millions of Southeast Asian farmers and fishermen, an Australian
researcher said on Tuesday.

Evidence suggested that completion of two dams on China's
stretch of the 4,800 km waterway, along with work to make the
Mekong more navigable, had triggered damaging changes in the
river's flow patterns, said Milton Osborne, a visiting fellow at
the Australian National University in Canberra.

The Mekong fell to record lows in the recent dry season.
Sudden drops in the river's levels stranded boats. In
impoverished Cambodia, the fish catch dropped by almost 50
percent after a 15 percent decline the year before, Osborne told
Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

"Many of these problems, which have been identified not just
by mad-eyed greenies but by serious scientists, are a cause for
concern," Osborne said.

Seventy percent of the 70 million people living in the Mekong
Basin, an area the size of France and Germany, depend on the fish
that teem in the river or on the crops that it irrigates.

Although experts would not be able to deliver a definitive
verdict for a decade, their current projections were worrying,
Osborne said. The Mekong was on a knife-edge.

"The cumulative effects of the developments that have taken
place, plus the additional physical changes that are planned with
more dams in China and the extension of river clearances further
downstream into Laos, mean that there is reason to be concerned
about the Mekong's future," Osborne said.

China began work this year on a third Mekong dam at Xiaowan in
the southwestern province of Yunnan that Osborne said would be a
"monster" with a wall 300 metres high and a reservoir 169 km
long. Only the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river would be
larger.

China says that, as well as generating much-needed
hydroelectric power, the dams benefit countries downstream --
Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam -- by smoothing the
flow of the mighty river.

But Osborne said the opposite was happening: construction of
the dams and the release of water to enable Chinese ships to sail
downstream were leading to substantial changes in river levels.

Apart from preventing some species of fish from returning to
their breeding grounds, the dams were blocking 35 percent of the
nutrient-rich sediment that used to flow down the Mekong, forming
fertile soil for millions of peasants.

Osborne, who acknowledged that drought and overfishing were
also factors behind dwindling fish catches, said the imbalance of
influence between China and the downstream countries meant
Beijing was unlikely to stop building dams on the Mekong.

China has declined repeated invitations to join the Mekong
River Commission, which oversees the health of the waterway.

"The construction of dams without consultation, the promotion
of river clearances and the extension of Chinese trade down the
river sit alongside other aspects of China's steady push to
assert its position of dominance in the region," Osborne said.