---
Sent From Bloomberg Mobile MSG
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
China Hydropower Dams in Mekong River Give Shocks to 60 Million
2010-10-26 21:01:56.0 GMT
By Yoolim Lee
Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- 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 (10 feet) higher.
The Mekong, which translates roughly as "mother of the
waters" in the Thai language, has become unpredictable since
China started building hydropower dams and blasting the rapids
upstream, says Somwang, 36, who's been fishing for a living
since he was 8.
In August 2008, there were devastating floods that reduced
his catches and income, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in
its December 2010 issue. Early this year, he witnessed the most
severe drought in his life.
Tens of millions of residents are experiencing similar
currents of change along the 4,800-kilometer-long (2,980-mile-
long) Mekong, which flows through six countries -- Southeast
Asia's longest river.
From its source in the Tibetan plateau, the river traverses
China's Yunnan province, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and
Vietnam before pouring into the South China Sea.
Livelihood Threatened
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.
China, hungry for electricity to fuel its breakneck growth,
has already built four hydropower dams on the Mekong, completing
the first one in 1993 without consulting its downstream
neighbors.
As it prepares to overtake Japan as the world's second-
largest economy this year, China wants to almost double its
hydropower capacity to at least 300 gigawatts by 2020 by
building four more dams on the Mekong, called Lancang Jiang, or
Turbulent River, in Chinese. That would give China 15 gigawatts
of power on the river.
Those 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" (Allen & Unwin, 2006).
'Selfish Lack of Concern'
"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. Communist 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 $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.
More than 130 hydropower projects are either operating or
projected for the river and its tributaries, according to the
Mekong River Commission, the intergovernmental group known as
the MRC.
Competition to exploit -- or conserve -- the limited water
resources is creating tensions among China, the countries of the
MRC and international environmental organizations.
'Disaster for Fisheries'
"Dams would spell disaster for Mekong fisheries and
ecology, a risk that millions of people in the region cannot
afford to take," says Aviva Imhof, campaigns director of
International Rivers, a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit
group that aims to protect rivers and human rights. "The Mekong
mainstream should be off-limits to the region's dam builders."
The struggle to develop the Mekong mirrors those around the
world where water resources are becoming increasingly scarce.
The United Nations estimated last year that almost half the
world's population will live in areas of "water stress" by
2030 as a result of climate change, population growth and
increased demand for food, energy and biofuels.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- a group
set up by the UN Environment Programme and the World
Meteorological Organization -- says the Mekong's delta is one of
the three on the planet most vulnerable to the impact of climate
change, including rising sea levels, saline intrusion and storms
that erode the coastline and undermine its ecosystem.
Mekong Delta
Building dams will worsen those effects, says Dekila
Chungyalpa, director of the Greater Mekong Program at the World
Wildlife Fund in Washington.
Building the proposed 12 mainstream dams with a total
installed capacity of 14,697 megawatts would generate as much as
$3.7 billion of annual revenue, according to the MRC's report on
the environmental impact of the mainstream dams in the lower
Mekong, published this month. As much as 31 percent of the money
would accrue to the governments of Cambodia and Laos.
Still, the dams would transform 55 percent of the
downstream river into a reservoir, making it into a series of
impoundments with slow water movement. The report, prepared by
an independent consulting firm in Australia, recommended that
MRC delay any decision on constructing the dams for 10 years.
The dams "have the potential to create transboundary
impacts and international tensions," the report says. "One dam
across the lower Mekong mainstream commits the river to
irrevocable change."
'Killing the Tree'
"It's like cutting the trunk of a tree," says Richard
Cronin, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Stimson
Center, an independent research institute in Washington. "It
will kill the tree."
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.
China aims to generate 15 percent of its power from non-
fossil-fuel sources by 2020, up from about 8 percent now.
The most-controversial projects are the 4,200-megawatt
Xiaowan dam in China, the tallest arch dam in the world, and the
1,260-megawatt Xayabouri dam in northern Laos, the first project
proposed by the Laotian government to be built in the lower
Mekong region.
Controversial Dams
The 240-megawatt Don Sahong, located in the Khone Falls
area in southern Laos and 1 kilometer upstream of the Cambodian
border, would block the area's most important fish migration
route, undermining fisheries-based livelihoods throughout the
basin, environmentalists say.
"The Mekong is very much an interconnected system," says
Jeremy Bird, chief executive officer of the MRC in Vientiane,
the capital of Laos. "If you intervene in one area, you see
consequences somewhere else," says Bird, whose office overlooks
the river.
Spanning 14 kilometers at its widest point, the Mekong is
home to more than 1,200 different species of fish -- making it
second in biodiversity only to the Amazon. They include
endangered species such as the Mekong giant catfish and the
Irrawaddy freshwater dolphin.
The lower Mekong basin is the world's largest inland source
of fish, accounting for almost 20 percent of the world's
freshwater fish yield, worth as much as $9.4 billion a year,
according to the WorldFish Center, an international nonprofit
research group based in Malaysia.
Source of Protein
Fish from Tonle Sap, a lake and tributary, and the Mekong,
for example, provide more than 70 percent of the protein in the
diet of Cambodia's 15 million people.
Following the Mekong's path downriver from northern
Thailand to Laos and Cambodia by boat and car, it's evident how
everyday life is entwined with the river's natural rhythm.
Mekong waters replenish crops, livestock and households and
are used in recreation and transportation. People catch fish by
the riverbank or on a narrow long-tail boat by using ubiquitous
handmade nets or fish traps made of bamboo; women wash dishes
and clothes; children swim, laugh and play. They don't use any
bait; they rest the net on the bottom for just a few minutes
before scooping the fish that pass by.
In September in central Laos, a three-day festival is being
held along the river to celebrate the annual dragon boat racing.
Twenty men wearing bright yellow, orange, red, green and blue
shirts row each of the five dragon boats.
Beer Lao, Algae Snacks
While loudspeakers blast local pop songs, children watch
the race and men and women drink Beer Lao and munch on snacks of
dried algae.
Until the 20th century, the Mekong River remained largely
unchanged from the days when it was explored by the French
Mekong expedition. Led by Francis Garnier, the team traveled up
the river from Vietnam to southern Yunnan in 1866 and 1867.
Plans to develop hydropower along the river have ebbed and
flowed since 1954, after Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia gained
independence from France.
In the late 1950s, studies by the UN and the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation proposed building dams that would help control
floods, irrigate crops and improve navigation. Those plans were
never carried out because the Mekong became the setting of the
Vietnam War.
Greater Mekong Program
After the war ended in 1975, political turbulence in the
region prevented any dam projects from proceeding until 1992,
when the Asian Development Bank launched the Greater Mekong
Subregion Program. Endorsed by the region's governments, the
program envisioned building a railway system, roads and bridges
to connect the more than 300 million people who live around the
Mekong. When the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997, those
plans were halted.
Now the region is again growing rapidly, led by China,
which expanded 9.1 percent in 2009 and an estimated 10.5 percent
this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. That's
increasing pressure to develop hydropower resources.
"Water represents one of the great diplomatic and
development opportunities of our time," U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton said at a speech in March marking World Water
Day. Last year, Clinton established the so-called Lower Mekong
Initiative as a way to address regional environmental
challenges. The U.S. government plans to spend $22 million this
year on environmental programs in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and
Vietnam.
Record Drought
This year's record drought has heightened tensions among
the nations along the river. In April, prime ministers from the
MRC countries held their first summit.
Chinese officials, who also attended the meeting, held at
Thailand's beach resort town of Hua Hin, told the conference
that China, too, is suffering from drought.
Most rivers in southern China are at about 40 percent of
normal levels, and more than 600 have dried up completely,
leaving almost 20 million people short of drinking water, Chen
Mingzhong, an official at the Water Resources Ministry, told the
conference.
"As an upstream country with a high sense of
responsibility, we do nothing harming the interest of riparian
countries downstream," Chen said. Chinese officials declined to
comment for this article.
China has taken steps to strengthen its cooperation with
the MRC in recent years, Bird says. At the height of the drought
in March, China agreed for the first time to provide the MRC
with dry-season data on water levels and volume from its two
hydrological stations. It already had been sharing its data
during the flood season since 2002.
Chinese Dams
In June, China, the MRC's dialogue partner since 1996,
invited officials from the four nations and the MRC Secretariat
to visit the Jing Hong and Xiaowan dams in Yunnan province.
China says its dams are beneficial because they can store
water for the dry season and control flooding in the rainy
season.
The Mekong has three seasons. The cool, dry period runs
from November to February. March and April are the hottest
months, when Thailand, Laos and Cambodia celebrate the New Year.
Then the wet season begins. With the May monsoon the Mekong
fills, expanding Cambodia's Tonle Sap, or Great Lake, to more
than five times its dry-season size of 2,700 square kilometers
(1,040 square miles). By July, the Khone Falls in southern Laos
-- the widest waterfall in the world -- is in full flood,
turning its crystal-blue waters to muddy brown.
Vietnam's Rice Basket
After September, the floodwaters begin to recede. The river
flows into the Mekong Delta, allowing Vietnam to have three
crops of rice a year.
Like the fishermen in northern Thailand who are
experiencing the impact of the Chinese dams upstream, residents
in the northern Cambodian province of Stung Treng are facing the
consequences of a dam built in a neighboring country: Vietnam.
Bu Sonthana, who fishes and farms in the village of Banmai,
says the local Mekong tributary started fluctuating erratically
in 1996. Since then, flooding of the Sesan River has destroyed
crops and the riverbank gardens where her village of 97
households grows tomatoes and tobacco during the dry season. Bu
Sonthana, 59, says it was only in 2001 that her community
learned Vietnam was damming the river 80 kilometers upstream.
By then, the $1 billion, 720-megawatt Yali Falls Dam had
commenced full operation, according to Ian Baird, an assistant
geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who
has carried out research on transboundary impact assessment in
the Sesan River basin. MRC data show hourly water level changes
in the Sesan River of as much as 1 meter in January 2003.
Unpredictable Floods
Rainy-season flooding, to which communities have long been
attuned, has been unusually severe and unpredictable since
Vietnam began building the dam, Bu Sonthana says.
"It has become more difficult to catch the fish and
farm," she says, sitting on the dirt floor in front of her
wooden shack with a dozen family members and neighbors. "We
didn't mind the floods before because they brought us a lot of
fish and we knew the water would recede naturally. Now it takes
many more days for the water to recede."
Vietnamese officials didn't respond to requests for comment
for this story.
"The governments say they are building dams to alleviate
poverty," Baird says. "If you ask the local people, they don't
feel any richer. So whose poverty are they alleviating?"
Nam Theun 2 Dam
International agencies such as the ADB and the World Bank
say Laos's Nam Theun 2 hydropower dam, which started operating
in March, is a model for how such projects can help eradicate
poverty.
"It is probably the most scrutinized hydropower project to
date," Bird says. "To what extent the lessons from the Nam
Theun 2 project will be incorporated to others -- that's the
real test because it shouldn't be seen as an isolated project."
The model was long in the making. The Laotian government
first targeted Nam Theun 2 and invited the World Bank to
participate in the 1980s.
Some 27 Thai and Western banks and export credit agencies
financed the project, which has cost $1.3 billion, slightly more
than estimated, the World Bank says. The government formed a
joint venture to operate the dam, Nam Theun 2 Power Co., whose
shareholders include Electricite de France SA, which owns 35
percent, and Electricity Generating Public Co. of Thailand, with
25 percent.
In 2003, Thailand's state-run utility EGAT agreed to buy
power from the 1,070-megawatt dam.
Government Revenue
In June, the Laotian government received $600,000, the
first revenue from exporting the dam's electricity, according to
a World Bank report. The government is set to earn an average of
$80 million per year during the first 25 years of the dam's
operation, the report says.
About 6,200 villagers were resettled to make way for the
reservoir the dam created. Some say their lives have improved.
In Nong Boua, 60 kilometers from the dam, 63 households now live
in wooden houses built on stilts along the road compared with
shacks they lived in before with no roads.
"It's nice to have a school and a clinic," says a
villager named Khammai. "But it's become more difficult to
irrigate the land."
Downstream from the dam, where about 120,000 people live,
villagers tell a different story. In Veun Sananh, a village of
76 families, a 45-year-old villager who only identified himself
by his first name, Kham, says about 35 adults and children
suffered from skin rashes after fishing in the river.
Officials from Nam Theun 2 Power visited the village in
June with antihistamine creams.
Skin Rashes
In the nearby Boeung Xe village, a 54-year-old villager
named Boun says 13 of the 350 people in his village had a skin
irritation this year after bathing in the river.
Nam Theun 2 Power has been investigating the skin rash
complaints and has brought in dermatologists and other experts
to help, according to a company spokesman, Aiden Glendinning.
About 4 to 5 percent of the total population of the affected
areas suffered from rashes during the peak period of May, and
about 20 cases remained as of mid-October, he says.
The company is also monitoring complaints about the fish
catch, he says. The dam has increased the flow of water during
the dry season.
"Some villagers who are used to catching fish by wading in
shallow areas during the dry season will now find this practice
more difficult," he says. "Other people who fish from boats
have reported increased fish catch."
Cambodia
About 700 kilometers south of Nam Theun 2, the Mekong
reaches Phnom Penh before flowing into the Mekong Delta and then
spilling into the South China Sea. A bustling city of 2 million
people dotted with temples and buildings from the French
colonial era, the Cambodian capital, too, depends on the river
for its livelihood.
"I've vaguely heard of some dams, but no one is really
talking about it here," says Pich Pov, 28, who operates a small
cruise boat and lives aboard it with his family. "The Mekong is
my mother. Everyone I know was born on this river, and she
provides us with food and shelter."
If China and its neighbors carry out all their dam-building
plans, the Mekong may cease to be the nurturing mother of the
waters for Pich Pov and millions more and instead be a turbulent
river.
For Related News and Information:
Bloomberg New Energy Finance: BNEF <GO>
Top Power Stories: PTOP <GO>
Top Energy Stories: ETOP <GO>
Top Environmental Stories: TOP ENV <GO>
Energy Asset Search: BMAP ENERGY <GO>
--With assistance from Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok, Ying Wang in
Beijing, Beth Thomas in Hanoi and Neil Western in Hong Kong.
Editors: Laura Colby, Jonathan Neumann
To contact the reporter on this story:
Yoolim Lee in Singapore at +65 6212-1581 or
yoolim@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Laura Colby at +1-212-617-1167 or
lcolby@bloomberg.net
To write a letter to the editor, send an e-mail to
bloombergmag@bloomberg.net or type MAG <Go>.
