The 1,170-mile (1,880 km) stretch of the Mekong River that snakes through Laos has long been a quiet backwater used for small-scale domestic trade, localized fishing and folklore. In recent years, however, it has become the focus of a new purpose. "A dam is what I hope for most," says Samboun Bounkeo, the thickly built chief of Thalon, a sloping village of dirt paths and thatched-roof riverfront homes in northern Laos. A stable supply of electricity, paved roads, new job opportunities and potentially much more is what a dam offers, he says. For families living on several hundred dollars per year, such development is exceedingly attractive.
Laos is among the poorest and least developed countries in Asia, and its communist government contends that hydropower, along with revenues generated from exporting it, can underwrite much of the country's progress. In many ways, Laos is tailor-made for hydropower development. Rivers and rainfall — the basic ingredients — are plentiful, and the mountainous landscape offers a natural means of generating the hydraulic momentum that can be transformed into electricity. The government's emphasis on cultivating hydropower, therefore, is "natural," says Viraphonh Viravong, the director of the Department of Electricity who regularly visits various sites in Laos tapped for new dams. So, too, says Viraphonh, is it logical that Laos would expand the scope and scale of its dams in order to benefit from economies of scale. (See pictures of life on the shores of the Mekong.)
But such escalation, say observers, could have dire consequences. At the crux of the controversy is the government's plan to introduce dams along the lower mainstream channel of the Mekong. As the river's widest and only continuous passage from beginning to end — and the spine that connects the many tributaries making up the wider river system — the main channel and its flow are most essential to the Mekong's health. In the late 1980s, China was the first country to install dams along the main channel, though at the time its projects drew little protest from governments of nations downstream. But further scientific research and the lobbying of environmental groups have drawn greater attention to the intensified risks of manipulating the mainstream, making it a highly controversial and, until now, an avoided undertaking.