Boy casts fishing net near Don Kho island on
the Mekong River in Laos, in undated photo.
Ian G.
Baird, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on dams
in Southeast Asia, tells of meeting a farmer
and his five-year-old son from a village in rural Laos in 2009.
The two
were sitting in a canoe as the sun rose over the Mekong, Baird wrote in 2011.
The
farmer removed a carp from his net and tossed it into a bamboo basket that his
son was holding.
The
farmer had caught four fish, not as many as when fishing with his father when
he was a child, but more than enough to feed his family of seven.
“We’re
not sure if my son’s children will be able to go fishing in the future,” the
farmer said. “The dams planned for the Mekong River scare us.”
Baird
noted that this father-and-son scene could easily be replicated hundreds of
thousands of times in rural villages situated along the Mekong and its
tributaries.
Fish are
a vital source of protein for the villagers, but the many dams already being
constructed on the Mekong River have been disrupting the migration of more than
a hundred species of fish.
For
children this loss of protein means slower mental development, poorer
performance at school, and less chance to improve their lives as adults.
Early warnings of the impact on children
Researchers
have warned in recent years that a loss of fish resources caused by dam
building in the region could devastate the health of rural children.
And signs
of malnutrition in some rural villages in the region, possibly for a variety of
reasons, were already being documented more than a decade ago.
Professor
Baird addressed the issue in mid-2011 when he published an article dealing with
the potential impact of a dam being built in Laos less than one kilometer north
of the Laos-Cambodia border.
Writing
for the journal Critical Asian Studies, Baird noted that in Stung Treng
Province in northeastern Cambodia, the provincial government’s Department of
Planning had already reported in 2003 that 45 percent of children there under
the age of five were underweight.
In Laos,
the situation was “even more worrying,” according to Baird.
Research
by the World Food Program (WFP) found at one point that Laos’ rural population
was experiencing “serious nutritional problems, with 50 percent of children
chronically malnourished.
Dam construction in Laos
In Laos,
construction around one major dam, the Don Sahong, has already blocked many
migrating fish and forced fishermen in the area to give up fishing altogether.
Some Lao
fishermen have been offered basic construction jobs at the dam sites, but they
find it difficult to adjust to losing a way of life that depended on fishing.
Fourteen
Lao families are reported to have been given construction jobs after receiving
training. Some are learning to drive trucks and will earn around $200 a month.
“But it’s
not easy to adjust to the new jobs,” one fisherman from the village of Houa
Sadam told RFA several weeks ago.
“We’ve
relied on fishing for a long time,” he said. “But we’re not allowed to catch
fish near the construction site.”
Another
villager said last spring that “we’re okay with working for the company to get
paid salaries, but we’re not highly educated like the others. So all we can do
is low-skill labor.”
The Don
Sahong Dam has been controversial ever since October 2013, when the government
of Laos notified the Mekong River Commission (MRC) of its intent to construct
the dam.
That was
only one month ahead of the start date for construction.
Three of
the other MRC members—Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam—argued that construction
of a dam on the Mekong’s mainstream required prior consultation under MRC
procedures.
But Laos
left no time for consultation, and might have ignored any recommendation made
by the MRC.
In
Cambodia, a study of “Food and Nutrition Security Vulnerability to Mainstream
Hydropower Dam Development” gives an idea of how bad things could get if
negative trends continue into the next decade.
That
report, issued by the Inland Fisheries Research and Development Institute in
Phnom Penh, concludes that losses to the supply of fish due to Cambodian
mainstream dams could cause consumption of inland fish to “dramatically
decline” by 2030.
The
report explains that dams and their reservoirs constitute a “double obstacle”
to fish.
“The dam
is a physical obstacle to adults trying to migrate upstream, and the reservoir
is an environmental obstacle to larvae and juveniles trying to migrate
downstream,” the report says.
Fish
passes, it says, can help mitigate the impact of dams, “but they are not a
magic bullet. …On the mainstream and in the lower part of the Mekong, the
intensity of migrations is such that no fish pass can provide a realistic
mitigation measure.”
One thing
that everyone in Cambodia seems to agree on is the difficulty of replacing fish
in the Cambodian diet.
Simon Funge-Smith,
a senior fisheries resources officer at the Rome-based Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), says that “the data from household surveys and numerous
nutrition studies clearly shows the importance of fish in the Cambodian diet.”
In an
email in answer to a query from RFA, Funge-Smith said that there are no
immediate replacements for fish in the form of other sources of animal and
plant protein, and “certainly none with the same nutritional quality as fish.”
Until
now, the Mekong River has been able to support the largest inland fishery
region in the world.
Radio
Free Asia, meanwhile, reported a year ago that the fish population in
Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake had declined significantly from the year before.
Fishermen
in the country’s Kampong Chhnang Province cited the construction of dams in the
region and climate change, among other factors, as causes of the decline of
fish stocks in Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake.
The
shortages then led to an increased price for fish in the region, making it
harder for residents to make prahok, the fermented fish paste that is a staple
of the Cambodian diet, according to Sim Sophana, a member of the provincial
Fishing Network nongovernmental organization.
Vietnam pays a heavy price
In Vietnam’s
heavily populated Mekong Delta, home to some 18 million people, one can see
most vividly the impact on vulnerable people brought on by a combination of El
Nino-induced drought, climate change, bad rice farming practices, the impact of
upstream dams, rising sea levels, and the intrusion of salt water.
Vietnamese
farmers in the Mekong Delta complain that upstream dams have greatly reduced
the amount of silt, or sediment, that once reached the Delta.
Rising
sea levels as well as the loss of silt that is needed to maintain riverbanks
and riverbeds have now resulted in salt water reaching nearly 40 miles into the
Delta.
According
to United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), in the 18
Vietnamese provinces most affected by the drought and salt intrusion, two
million people, including 520,000 children, are in need of humanitarian
assistance.
An
estimated 1.5 million of those two million live in the Mekong Delta, where
“water shortages have been exacerbated by the saltwater intrusion,” UNICEF said
in situation report on June 10.
The Delta
is the source of 50 percent of Vietnam’s staple food crops and 60 percent of
its fish production.
The first
of those to pay the price for its diminishing productivity are the most
vulnerable members of Vietnamese society—women and children.
Dan
Southerland
