Activists Vow To Take On First Dam on Lower Mekong

  •  bangkok
  • Inter Press Service

A hydropower dam project in Laos that could permanently scar South-east Asia's largest river, the Mekong, faces a strong wall of opposition from local and regional green groups determined to protect its pristine environment.

This defiance comes in the wake of the Lao government's submission in late September of plans for the 1,260-megawatt Sayaboury dam project, confirming its intention to proceed with it and win approval for the first megadam on the mainstream of the lower Mekong, which is also shared by Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

'It is very dangerous and damaging to the environment and the people to have dams on the Mekong,' Premrudee Daoroung of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA), a Bangkok-based green lobby, said in an interview. 'We are suspicious that this is an effort to move this problematic dam-building process forward.'

Environmentalists' opposition to the dam, which is to be built in the north-west Lao province of Sayaboury, sets the stage for a three-cornered battle that will test the limits of environmental diplomacy in this region. Drawn into this tussle, besides the green groups and the governments, is the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-governmental organisation based in the Lao capital, Vientiane.

The Lao government's submission triggers the MRC's mechanism for assessing dam proposals like the Sayaboury one and its cross-border impacts. But while officials say this allows discussion of dam projects that have caused tensions in the past, Save the Mekong, a coalition of local and regional green groups, finds it deeply flawed. This mechanism, which has existed for the past 15 years, is now being dusted off and tested for the first time: the prior consultation process for dam building, formally known as the Procedure for Notification Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA).

'The Sayaboury dam's project documents, submitted to the MRC Secretariat by the Lao government thus initiating the PNPCA, have not been released to the public and represent a complete failure of transparency; this despite the fact that a stated principle of the PNPCA is transparency,' Save the Mekong said in an Oct. 13 letter to MRC Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Bird. 'Official documents on the MRC's website about the PNPCA process lack a clear explanation of the actual procedure to be followed, contain wording that is deliberately ambiguous, and have no commitment to consultation with the public,' it added.

But Bird sees the PNPCA, which was written into the agreement that helped create the MRC in 1995, in a different light. 'The process will be a test for (MRC) member countries' commitment to sustainable development of water and related resources of the Mekong,' he explained in an e- mail interview.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service