ລາວໂຮມລາວ ເພື່ອປະຊາທິປະໄຕ

Dam Bad

Laos’ Plans to Dam the Mekong Could Open the Floodgates to Further Dams on the River

Sathian Megboon is a DJ for 94.5 FM, a radio station in northeast Thailand. It’s a fun gig, he says, because the station broadcasts across the Mekong River to Vientiane, the tiny capital of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, which gives him the chance to take requests from listeners in two countries. Last year, listeners started calling more than usual, but not to ask for the folk songs Sathian likes to play. They wanted to know what he thought of reports that a Thai company was planning to build a $3.5 billion dam a few hundred kilometers upstream on the Lao-Thai border in a remote and impoverished mountain area.

Sathian’s Vientiane listeners may have read about the proposed Xayaburi dam in The Vientiane Times, a mouthpiece for the secretive Lao Communist Party. But they wanted the real story: Namely, how would a hydropower dam in Xayaburi Province affect them?

photo courtesy International Rivers

The DJ said he wasn’t sure, because he isn’t a politician or hydropower expert. But building dams on the Mekong – the world’s tenth-longest river – seemed to him a terrible idea. China, which borders northern Laos, built four hydroelectric dams on the upper Mekong between 1986 and 2009. Sathian and his neighbors say those dams have changed the Mekong’s “flood pulse,” the seasonal ebb and flow that regulates agriculture and fishing and feeds the Lower Mekong Basin’s 60 million residents. According to elder farmers who grew up beside the Mekong, erratic flow patterns that appeared in the 1990s have made it harder to grow staple crops such as chili peppers, eggplants, and corn. They say they cannot imagine how additional dams would improve the situation.

Sathian and his neighbors claim that, in 2007, Chinese dams triggered violent flooding. “It happened very fast, and we didn’t have any warning,” Sathian, who is 63 and generously tattooed, told me on a lethargic mid-April afternoon. “It wasn’t raining, but the river flooded for seven days! If they build a new dam in Xayaburi, I’m afraid the next flood could be like a tsunami.”

We were standing on the banks of the Mekong under a white banner that said no mekong dams in English. Looking across the river, I saw monks in orange robes bathing against the backdrop of Vientiane’s unassuming skyline. Fishing skiffs were gliding downstream, and the air felt sticky and stagnant. It was hard to imagine that a planned hydropower dam hundreds of miles upstream, in the mountains of landlocked Laos, had caused such fear. But a few weeks earlier, 263 nongovernmental organizations from 51 countries had written to the Lao prime minister and urged him to cancel

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/dam_bad