BANGKOK — Chinese construction and electricity companies have controversially begun work on hydroelectric dams in Burma and Cambodia on the eve of a regional conference dedicated to “addressing future challenges in trans-boundary water resources management.”
Another controversial hydroelectric dam has just begun pumping electricity out of Laos into Thailand.
The pace of hydroelectric dam projects is picking up across Southeast Asia at a time when their social value and threat to an environment already under stress from climate change is being questioned by many experts.
But the Mekong Rivers Commission, comprising Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, is meeting in the Thai seaside resort of Hua Hin on Friday for a two-day conference to celebrate its 15 years existence.
Government officials from China and Burma have been invited to what is widely seen as a very political gathering—with environmentalists saying billions of US dollars are being committed to rashly harnessing delicate river systems on which millions of people depend.
“Extensive plans for hydro power development threaten the ecological integrity of the entire Mekong basin, and will undermine the food security and livelihoods of millions of people that depend on the region's rivers' natural wealth,” Carl Middleton of the US-based NGO International Rivers Network told The Irrawaddy.
“These projects epitomize an out-dated and unsustainable mode of development that violates affected people’s rights and fails to ensure equitable and sustainable development,” he said.
Middleton is a co-organizer of an alternative environmental conference being held at the Mekong Studies Center of Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. to coincide with the “official” rivers meeting in Hua Hin. It has attracted 12 NGOs.
Political leaders in some of the countries where hydroelectric schemes are being built or planned argue that the electricity will bring benefits to poor people who now have no access to anything as simple as an electric light switch.
That’s the view of the Cambodian government, which gave the green light to two hydroelectric dams to be built by Chinese firms at a cost of about US $1.1 billion.
The dams will be built in Koh Kong province west of Phnom Penh but there is a suspicion that some of the 580 megawatts of capacity planned might be sold across the border to Thailand.
Critics of the MRC argue that it has failed to communicate with the people most affected by dams.
Mean Meach, of the 3S Rivers Protection Network working with dam- affected communities along the Sesan, Srepok, and Sekong rivers in northeast Cambodia, said: “It would be beneficial if the MRC were more proactive on promoting issues of public participation, inclusion of indigenous people, and transparency.
“Improvements in technology and policy now make renewable electricity a viable option [to hydroelectric dams] in developing countries.”
To the west of Thailand meanwhile, just inside the Burmese border, work has begun on the biggest hydroelectric dam ever to be built in the region—the massive 7,100 megawatt capacity Tasang project on the Salween River.
Again, Chinese state firms are involved. They took over the $9 billion development after a Thai firm failed to get the project under way.
Most of the electricity from this dam was originally earmarked for Thailand , certainly not impoverished Burma, which has one of the lowest levels of electricity availability in the world for a country of its size and population.
Now, however, it’s believed by observers that much of the power will be pumped to China’s neighboring Yunnan province, where a central government ban on many hydroelectric dam projects has been imposed.
Earlier dams on the Yunnan section of the Mekong are being blamed for record low water levels on the river downstream, exacerbated by a severe drought.
Researcher Jeff Rutherford, who several years ago made a furtive tour of Yunnan’s dam projects (some now aborted) for a Chiang Mai University project, is not surprised by China’s increasing involvement in hydro dam work, especially in Burma.
“It's business. It’s dirty, murderous business, but it has a certain twisted logic,” he told The Irrawaddy.
