A string of countries along the Mekong river come together to preserve its ecosystem and protect lives
Remember Martin Sheen’s boat journey through the cloudy mist in Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1979 film Apocalypse Now? That was shot in the Philippines and not in Vietnam, but its mythical Nung river was suggestive of the mystique of the Mekong. Grand in sweep and throbbing with life, it originates on the Tibetan Plateau and flows through six countries before joining the South China Sea in Vietnam.
The Mekong basin is second only to the Amazon in biodiversity. As the world’s largest inland fishery, it alone provides one-fourth of the world’s freshwater catch—worth up to $7 billion annually—and nourishes the earth’s most fertile alluvial fields that support at least 60 million people. Despite population growth, parts of the Greater Mekong region remain one of the world’s last biological treasure troves. Last year alone, researchers recorded 126 new species there.
But the Mekong’s bounty is also proving to be its undoing. Rising demand for farmland, mainly for rubber and rice, is fast stripping this landscape of its lush forests. Swathes of mangroves have been converted into shrimp farms, and the timber mafia has thrived on illegal felling. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar lost 22-24 per cent of their forests between 1973 and 2009, while 43 per cent of woodland was cleared in Thailand and Vietnam.
In the 1990s, the Chinese government began to build a series of large dams on the Upper Mekong. In the mid-2000s, Laos and Cambodia also announced 11 large hydropower projects on the main channel of the Lower Mekong, with plans to sell most of the electricity to Thailand and Vietnam. More than 100 smaller projects are also proposed on the Lower Mekong. The commercial potential of the Mekong basin has long been recognised. In the 1950s, the UN formed the Mekong Committee and launched its largest development programme. Four decades later, four lower basin countries—Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam —signed the Mekong Agreement, creating the Mekong River Commission (MRC) in 1995 to take charge of their own destiny and shift the focus somewhat from mega development to sustainable management of resources. In 2002, China agreed to share hydrological information on the Lancang (upper Mekong) river with the MRC to help flood forecasting downstream.
The efforts to protect the Mekong got a boost in 2009 when the Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI) was launched in Phuket by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the foreign ministers of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The goal was to manage this vibrant ecosystem, its rich natural resources and its people, as an interdependent whole by enhancing cooperation not just in conservation, but also education, migration and infrastructure development. In a political breakthrough, Myanmar too joined the initiative last year.
In 2011, The Friends of the Lower Mekong (FLM), a group of stakeholders, was set up to complement the LMI and collaborate on efforts among regional and donor countries such as Australia, Japan and the US, as well as the Asian Development Bank and World Bank.
Last year, Clinton launched the LMI 2020 and pledged to invest $50 million over three years in addition to the bilateral assistance the US provides to member countries. The LMI also set up a two-track structure: one for aid agencies and NGOs and the other for senior officials and ministers.
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The going has been tough, though. In 2010, a joint environmental assessment warned that the 11 proposed dams on the Lower Mekong would cause stagnation in more than half the lower river and block fish migration. This would reduce the Mekong’s fish species by 26-42 per cent, resulting in annual losses of $500 million. The LMI estimated that at least 100 species would face extinction, 1,000 people risk displacement, and the food security of over two million would be threatened.
China’s upstream dams already threaten to reduce the flow of sediments in the Mekong by an estimated 50 per cent. This would be halved again if the 11 dams came up, leaving just about a quarter of the original levels. The result would be the destabilisation of coastlines and flood plains of the Mekong delta, and a loss of Vietnam’s rice fields. Already, thousands of Vietnamese families are struggling to cope with saltwater ingression in the Mekong delta, which has started retreating after expanding for some 5,000 years.
Of the 11 proposed dams, the $3.8 billion Xayaburi hydroelectric project in Laos has been the main bone of contention. Laos hopes the dam will make it ‘the battery of Southeast Asia’ and that its sputtering economy will gain by selling surplus electricity to Thailand. But Cambodia and Vietnam have reason to complain the dam will destroy their fishing and farming industries.
In 2011, the MRC countries agreed to conduct detailed studies on the impact of the proposed dams, but Laos unilaterally decided last year to go ahead with the Xayaburi Dam. This January, Cambodia and Vietnam confronted Laos for violating the MRC agreement and insisted that no dams be constructed until an independent study was completed. Xayaburi remains a key test for the LMI as it would set a precedent for other proposed hydel projects.
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Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, a key part of the LMI, warned last month that if the large-scale loss of forests in the Mekong basin continued at its present rate, it would wipe out or irreversibly fragment 34 per cent of the remaining woodlands of the region by 2030. It added that major threats emanate from Myanmar, which is expected to undergo rapid economic growth after the end of its junta rule, and the southern Mekong sections of Vietnam and Cambodia.
The sheer scale of the challenge, however, has not overwhelmed the Mekong initiative. Substantial investments have been made to protect the wetlands. A rigorous joint monitoring system to watch the river’s water levels and rainfall is already in place with Chinese participation. With sustainable hydro power in focus worldwide, Laos is being watched closely by the rest of the world. Myanmar has agreed to completely stop exporting timber from 1 April 2014 to save its forests.
Last year, the Mekong Initiative twinned the MRC with the Mississippi River Commission, which is grappling with the challenge of resuscitating another great river system after decades of abuse. “We made a lot of mistakes,” admitted Clinton at the 2012 LMI meeting in Phnom Penh. “Just to be very blunt about it, we started more than a hundred years ago, so we’ve learned some hard lessons about what happens when you make certain infrastructure decisions.” With the world lending a hand, the countries of the Mekong basin may yet change course and avoid the same mistakes.
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