Tag Archives: food security

The Don Sahong Dam

Posted on by
Reply

Potential Impacts on Regional Fish Migrations, Livelihoods, and Human Health

By Ian G. Baird

Abstract:

Plans are underway to construct twelve large hydropower projects on the un-dammed lower and middle mainstream Mekong River in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. One of the planned projects is a 30–32 meter–high hydroelectric dam with an expected 240 MW installed generating capacity to be built on the Hou Sahong Channel, less than one kilometer north of the Laos–Cambodia border, in the Khone Falls area of Khong District, Champasak Province, southern Laos. The project’s objective is to generate revenue by exporting electricity to Thailand or Cambodia. Concerns have been raised about the Don SahongDam (DSD), however. The main ones relate to potential repercussions on aquatic resources, and especially wild-capture fisheries dependent on migratory fish. This article examines the regional implications of the DSD, including possible impacts on food security, nutrition, and poverty alleviation. Fisheries losses in the Mekong Region from the DSD would negatively affect the nutrition of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, especially in parts of Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand where nutritional standards are already low. Mekong fisheries are integral to food security in the region, and the DSD would make it difficult for governments, especially in Laos and Cambodia, to reach their health-related United Nations Millennium Development Goals and their objectives for reducing poverty.

Free to download.

Critical Asian Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713695955

The Don Sahong Dam

U.S. To Spend $187 Million on Lower Mekong Initiative

Posted on by
Reply

By Merle David Kellerhals Jr. Staff Writer for U.S. Department of State

Washington — The United States will spend approximately $187 million on projects to help four nations of the Lower Mekong River basin lessen the impact of climate change on water resources, food security and the health and livelihoods of nearly 60 million people.

During the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting July 22 in Hanoi, Vietnam, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described growing cooperation between the United States and the Lower Mekong countries — Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The spending plan for 2010 covers environmental issues, health concerns, and education and training, with the largest share going to health programs.

“Managing this resource and defending it against threats like climate change and infectious disease is a transnational challenge,” Clinton told foreign ministers from the four countries at a private meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN forum.

“Regional cooperation is essential to meeting that challenge, to preserving the ecological diversity and fertility of the Mekong region,” she said. “We expect to continue similar levels of funding for the next two years.”

More than 60 million people in four countries live in the Lower Mekong basin, which is an area of approximately 606,000 square kilometers in Southeast Asia. The Mekong River Commission has reported that climate change most likely will increase flooding throughout the region, which will affect food production and food security.

The Lower Mekong Initiative was launched in July 2009 at the ASEAN meeting in Phuket, Thailand. The program’s objective is to promote the equitable, sustainable and cooperative development of the Mekong River, which is the world’s largest inland fishery and a transboundary resource, says Timothy Hamlin, a research associate at the Washington-based Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Project.

“The region is growing rapidly and faces many difficult decisions, especially pertaining to energy security,” Hamlin said earlier this year. “The United States can provide technology and assistance to identify and promote regional solutions to the pressing demands of energy, food and human security.”

The region faces the twin challenges of climate change and its impact on the river’s ecosystems, and the impact of expanding populations, the Mekong River Commission says.

LOWER MEKONG ASSISTANCE

The United States will spend more than $22 million this year on environmental programs in the Lower Mekong basin. One initiative will launch a three-year program to assist the four countries in developing cooperative strategies to address the impact of climate change.

A sister-river partnership was announced in May between the Mekong River Commission and the Mississippi River Commission in the United States. This partnership aims to improve the management of transboundary water resources. Work continues on the development of “Forecast Mekong,” which is a modeling tool to show the impact of climate change and some other challenges to sustainable development in the river basin.

A two-year research program has been funded among universities in the Lower Mekong countries to study persistent organic pollutants in the basin, according to the U.S. State Department.

The largest share of the funding this year is $147 million for health improvement programs that include a project targeting emerging pandemic threats in the region. The project will improve the identification of and response to new public health threats that originate in animals and aims to strengthen animal and human health systems to thwart outbreaks of infectious diseases.

A partnership is being launched to respond to infectious diseases by training health professionals and veterinarians to detect, track and contain outbreaks, and to establish a regional network to detect drug-resistant malaria. This builds on work launched at the Lower Mekong Conference on Transnational Infectious Disease Cooperation in June.

In addition to the other programs, U.S. assistance has provided HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention services to more than 2 million people across the Mekong region. This has contributed to a 50 percent reduction in the HIV/AIDS infection rate in Cambodia, facilitated the provision of antiretroviral treatments in Vietnam and supported the largest clinical trial of a vaccine regimen for preventing HIV infection in Thailand, according to the State Department.

The initiative announced in Hanoi by Clinton includes $18 million for education projects that include Internet availability for poor and rural areas and a program to bring regional professionals in education, environment and health to the United States to consult with professionals in their fields.

The initiative also supports English-language training through in-country scholarships that help professionals working in the Lower Mekong region to improve communications regionally and internationally.

Source

Vietnam’s Mekong paddies dry up

Posted on by
Reply

by Aude Genet for AFP

QUE DIEN, Vietnam (AFP) – The rivers that should nourish his thirsty rice paddies are too salty, and the rains are late this year. Dang Roi does not know if he will be able to salvage anything from this spring’s crop.

Vietnam is the world’s second-biggest rice exporter and the Mekong Delta, where Roi farms, accounts for more than half of its production.
But Roi’s paddy fields in Ben Tre province are burning up during a drought which meteorologists say is the worst in decades.

The dry season should have ended already, but in the yard of Roi’s house in Que Dien commune, barrels that collect rainwater for his family’s cooking and washing show the desperate situation. They are half-full, or empty.

Experts say Vietnam is one of the countries most threatened by climate change, whose effects are seen in worsening drought, floods, typhoons, exaggerated tides, and rising sea levels.

The country is planning for a one-metre (three feet) rise in sea levels by 2100, which would flood about 31,000 square kilometres (12,400 square miles) of land — an area about the size of Belgium — unless systems such as dykes are strengthened, said a UN discussion paper released last year.

It said the threat of floods is greatest in the Mekong Delta, where 17 million people live.

Read article on Yahoo!

Visit AFP

Avoiding Crisis in the Mekong River Basin

Posted on by
Reply

PRASHANTH PARAMESWARAN for WORLD POLITICS REVIEW

Earlier this month, the leaders of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and host country Thailand gathered for the first-ever Mekong River Commission (MRC) summit to discuss the future of the Mekong, one of the world’s longest and most resource-rich rivers.

There was much to discuss. The Mekong — which flows through China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, and provides food, water, and transport for about 65 million people — is now at its lowest level in two decades due to a prolonged drought. Its future is also in peril due to a host of natural and man-made threats. Unless riparian states make a concerted, joint effort to manage the river’s resources prudently and sustainably, their actions risk threatening food security, destroying livelihoods, and heightening regional tensions.

The main threat is from hydropower. China, which already has five operational dams, plans to construct about 15 more large- to mega-sized hydropower dams upstream, while Southeast Asian states themselves mull building 11 of their own further downstream. While these dams do not deplete the river’s water supply outright, they affect the hydrology of the Mekong by altering the natural timing and volume of the river’s seasonal flows. According to a recent report (.pdf) by the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, resulting reductions in silt deposits downstream could threaten one of the most productive regions of wet rice cultivation, while erratic water currents may block the spawning migration of fish in what is now the world’s largest freshwater fishery.

Other trends are equally, if not more worrying. Demographic and development pressures will further increase demand on the river’s already threatened resources. According to projections (.pdf) by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the population in the Lower Mekong is expected to swell to 90 million by 2025, with over a third living in urban areas. Total irrigation water requirements for the region, which stood at about 43,700 million cubic meters in 2002, will rise to about 56,700 million cubic meters by the end of this year.

Disruptive climate change threats also hover in the longer-term future. Global conservation group WWF predicts intense floods and droughts, coastal erosion, higher seas and heat waves for the Mekong Delta. Vietnam’s own Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment says that if sea levels rise 30 inches by 2100, 20 percent of the Delta and 10 percent of Ho Chi Minh City could be swamped.

Read article… All the links to .pdf documents after the jump.

Visit World Politics Review

Prashanth Parameswaran is research assistant at the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington-based think tank that covers Asian security issues. He is also a research fellow for Asia Chronicle, a daily online journal, and blogs about international affairs at GlobalEye.

Drought brings severe hardship to riverside communities, demonstrates need for regional cooperation to protect Mekong River

Posted on by
Reply

Save The Mekong

March 14, is the International Day of Action for Rivers. As the Mekong suffers its worst drought in decades, painfully demonstrating the importance of the river to the region’s people, and revived plans to build dams on the mainstream threaten the river’s ecology and resources, this is a day to reflect upon the life-giving benefits that rivers provide, and to take action to protect the Mekong River for present and future generations.

Severe Drought

The Mekong River is facing an increasingly severe drought that holds serious implications for river-side communities and the wider population of the Mekong region. To date, the people of Yunnan Province of China, Eastern Shan State of Burma, North and Northeastern Thailand and Northern Lao have especially suffered. Fish catch has declined, water for irrigated agriculture, livestock and drinking has become scarce, and river transportation has been grounded, affecting trade and tourism.

The loss of fisheries, crops, livestock and drinking water has struck the livelihoods, food security and economies of some of the region’s poorest communities. In the context of the ongoing global economic crisis, these communities have few alternative means to see them through this disaster.

There is a high likelihood of far wider impacts throughout the Mekong basin, as the river is usually at its lowest in April and May. In Laos, river-side communities are already reporting scarcity of fish and lack of water for dry season, river bank horticulture. In Cambodia, the drought threatens the massive fisheries productivity of the Tonle Sap Lake, where the total fish catch each year is proportional to the extent of flooding, and is central to Cambodia’s food security and economy. In the Mekong delta in Vietnam, where over 10 million farmers and fishers live, saltwater intrusion threatens the farming and fisheries and has been reported in some places to have already extended nearly 60 kilometers in land, which is double the usual extent.

Mekong River Commission: Negligence

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) issued a statement on the drought on 26 February 2010, over two weeks after the media began reporting the severity of the situation. The statement attributes the exceptionally low Mekong River water-levels to a “drier than normal” wet season in 2009 combined with “a consistent pattern of monthly precipitation significantly below average amounts since September 2009” in Yunnan Province China, Northern Thailand and Northern Laos.

Given these apparently clear indicators foreshadowing the severity of the drought, available since at least September 2009, and that the MRC Secretariat is charged with monitoring this data, the MRC Secretariat’s failure to warn the public and instigate precautionary actions amounts to a serious negligence on its part.

This situation mirrors the earlier failure of the MRC Secretariat in August 2008 to warn with sufficient notice communities in Northern Thailand and Northern Laos whose livelihoods were devastated by the flooding. This failure was widely criticized by communities and NGOs at the time, and the recurrent situation indicates serious systemic incompetence within the MRC.

The Save the Mekong coalition remains disappointed over the MRC Secretariat’s poor record on transparency, access to data and belated action, now for the drought conditions as well as on the proposed Mekong mainstream dams, and calls for a public review of the MRC Secretariat’s performance.

China’s dams

The MRC has sought to exonerate China’s dams on the Mekong River’s upper mainstream (Lancang) from the severity of the drought in its reports and through the media. The MRC has taken this position despite the fact that neither China nor the MRC have publicly released data supporting this position. China began filling the reservoir of the Xiaowan Dam – the world’s highest arch dam and the fourth built on the Lancang – in October 2009. This timing, and the subsequent drop in downstream flows, coincides with the MRC’s identified onset of the drought.

It is not surprising that communities in downstream countries are suspicious of the Lancang dams’ contribution to the current drought. Changes to the Mekong River’s daily hydrology and sediment load since the early 1990s have already been linked to the operation of the Lancang dam cascade by academics. As a result, communities downstream in Northern Thailand, Burma and Laos have suffered loss of fish and aquatic plant resources impacting local economies and livelihoods. These dams in China have been built without consultation, apology, disclosure of data, compensation or restitution, all of which are now long overdue.

The first turbine of the Manwan dam – the first dam built on the Lancang – came online in 1992, coinciding with the 1992-1993 Mekong drought. Construction of the second Lancang dam was completed in October 2003, coinciding with the 2003-2004 drought. Construction of the third dam, Jinghong, was completed in late 2008. The Xiaowan Dam, presently filling its reservoir, has a reservoir capacity approximately five times larger than that of the combined storage of these three earlier dams.

The role that these dams played in earlier droughts has never been clarified or communicated; instead the facts have often been muddied. The Thai National Mekong Committee, for example, in a report this year on the drought identified the Manwan Dam to have started operation in 1994, rather than 1992, thus masking the potential implications of the dam during the 1992-3 drought.

The extreme suffering of the drought-stricken farmers in Yunnan province, China, is shared by fishers and farmers in Thailand and Laos. The Save the Mekong Coalition therefore makes a direct appeal to the Chinese Government to equitably share the remaining water resources between countries to alleviate to the extent possible the suffering of all river-dependent communities.

On 10 March 2010, the Bangkok Post reported that Chinese officials have invited the lower Mekong country governments to visit the Jinghong dam to inspect the water levels. In addition, the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok held a press conference on March 11 to state their position on the situation. The Save the Mekong Coalition welcomes these gestures of increasing transparency and disclosure.

The easiest and most accountable way for China to build trust with downstream communities and demonstrate that its dams are not compounding the impacts of the current drought would be to invite representatives of civil society as observers to the inspection trip to Jinghong, and to extend the trip to all four Lancang dam projects. Disclosure of all the data regarding rainfall, river and reservoir water-levels, and dam operation since the mid-1980s, when dam construction started, together with subsequent regular public reporting on dam operation and water levels, would build further trust with downstream neighbors. This should lead to negotiation with downstream countries over reparation for the project’s existing impacts and restitution to minimize future impacts.

Mekong Mainstream Dams: Threat to Ecosystems, Livelihoods and Food Security

In addition to plans for up to fifteen dams on the Lancang (upper Mekong) mainstream in China, the Mekong River is threatened by plans for eleven hydropower dams on the lower mainstream in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand which, if built, would have severe consequences on a regional scale. By blocking the river’s massive fish migrations, building these dams would place at risk the millions of people who depend upon the Mekong for their income, livelihood and food security. Experience around the world demonstrates that there is no way of mitigating such large dams’ impacts on fisheries. The Save the Mekong Coalition has consistently called for all actors to protect the Mekong River for present and future generations. We emphasize the importance of the river for the food security of millions of people throughout the region. Conveying this message, in October 2009, a 23,110 signature petition was sent to the Prime Ministers of Cambodia, Lao, Thailand and Vietnam. The petition was also sent to the Chairpersons of the National Mekong Committees (NMCs) of Cambodia, Lao, Thailand and Vietnam calling for a strong and trusted consultative process at the national and local level on development options for the Mekong River, which guarantees the participation of all riparian communities.

The present severe drought and the extreme floods of 2008 testify to the dynamic nature of the river, but also to its seasonal variation and the need for a far more cautious approach to human intervention in the river’s future. More dams are not the solution to a warming world. The Save the Mekong Coalition is very concerned about recent announcements by the Thai government that has sought to justify dam construction to fix the drought, including the Ban Koum and Pak Chom mainstream dams. Building dams on the Lancang-Mekong River’s mainstream will further undermine the river’s resilience. The Save the Mekong Coalition calls for a better approach that sustainably meets energy needs whilst at the same time protecting the region’s rivers.

Urgent Regional Cooperative Action Required

The severe drought highlights once again the importance of the Mekong River and its resources to all riparian communities that live along it, as well as the wider Mekong basin population.

Cooperation under the MRC has failed to ensure a coordinated and preemptive response to the drought. Under these exceptional circumstances, it is critical that the Mekong region’s governments, including China, proactively work together to share information and forge a cooperative response to work with riverside communities along the entire length of the river to minimize the drought’s economic, social and environmental costs.

For more information, please contact:

Pianporn Deetes, Living River Siam, Tel. +66 (0) 81-422-0111;
email: [email protected] ; www.livingriversiam.org

Montree Chantavong, Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA)
Tel. +66 (0) 81-950-0560; email: [email protected] ; www.terraper.org

Carl Middleton, International Rivers, Tel: +66 (0) 84-6815332;
email: [email protected]; www.internationalrivers.org

The Save the Mekong coalition is a network of non-government organizations, community groups, academics, journalists, artists, fishers, farmers and ordinary people from within the Mekong countries and internationally. For more information on the coalition and the impacts of the planned Mekong mainstream dams in English and regional languages, please visit: www.SavetheMekong.org.

Backgrounder on The Mekong: Dam Locations and Status

Posted on by
Reply

It might be worth you familiarising yourself with the dam locations and the status of their development.

It’s worth a bookmark.

From Save The Mekong Coalition. Plenty resources here.

Save the Mekong Coalition

The Mekong River is under threat. The governments of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are planning eleven big hydropower dams on the Mekong River’s mainstream. If built, the dams would block major fish migrations and disrupt this vitally important river, placing at risk millions of people who depend upon the Mekong for their food security and income.

Visit Save The Mekong Coalition Online

‘We cannot eat electricity’

Posted on by
Reply

From Thanh Nien News

The adverse impacts of climate change on the Mekong Delta in Vietnam will be amplified several times if hydropower dams planned upstream by other countries are built, experts say.

Both local and international experts said at a forum on the Mekong River environment organized by the Can Tho University on Wednesday that the dams will seriously threaten food security in riparian countries.

Dao Trong Tu, former Vietnam country coordinator for the Mekong River Commission, said three hydropower dams are already under construction in China, and another 11 were planned in Laos and Cambodia.

La Chhuon, an expert of Oxfam Australia in Cambodia, said fishermen in the country had told him they wanted to eat fish and would not be able to eat electricity generated by hydropower dams.

Without exception, every resident was unhappy with the building of dams and did not care for the compensation they would get when they are displaced by such projects, he added.

Carl Middleton, Mekong Program Coordinator of International Rivers, an INGO, that seeks to protect rivers and defend the rights of communities that depend on them, stressed that the projects threatened food security in the region.

He estimated that Mekong riparian countries would lose 700,000 to 1.6 million tons of fish a year to the dams, while this has been the main food for millions people there.

Read article…

Visit Thanh Nien News Online

Thousands displaced by flooding

Posted on by
Reply

May Titthara and Chhay Channyda for The Phnom Penh Post

“Everything of mine, including rice, is destroyed. We are staying under a tent, filled with fear,” said weeping villager Ket Suon, 43, who fled his home with his family as it was crushed by the storm Tuesday evening.

As of last night, the National Committee for Disaster Management confirmed 14 deaths across the Kingdom. In addition to the nine who died in Kampong Thom when their houses collapsed on Tuesday night, three deaths were confirmed in Siem Reap province, where the river burst its banks and caused widespread flooding. Two more deaths were confirmed in northeastern Ratanakkiri province from flash floods.

The toll is expected to rise, with scattered reports of fatalities still emerging from remote rural areas. Sorn Thoeun, disaster reduction coordinator at World Vision, said two people also died in Mondulkiri province, although the province’s deputy governor, Yim Lux, said that they were only “missing”.

Relief efforts were under way Thursday, with local authorities and Red Cross officials working to help those who lost their homes or were forced to flee because of flooding.

“When you’ve got hundreds or thousands of hectares of rice fields affected by floods, that could affect food security in the coming months,” said Sharon Wilkinson, Cambodia director for CARE International.

Read article…

Visit Phnom Penh Post Online

World’s river deltas sinking due to human activity, says new study led by CU-Boulder

Posted on by
Reply

From EurekaAlert.org…

24 of world’s 33 major deltas sinking, 85 percent have experienced severe flooding recently

A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world’s low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk.

While the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluded many river deltas are at risk from sea level rise, the new study indicates other human factors are causing deltas to sink significantly. The researchers concluded the sinking of deltas from Asia and India to the Americas is exacerbated by the upstream trapping of sediments by reservoirs and dams, man-made channels and levees that whisk sediment into the oceans beyond coastal floodplains, and the accelerated compacting of floodplain sediment caused by the extraction of groundwater and natural gas.

The study concluded that 24 out of the world’s 33 major deltas are sinking and that 85 percent experienced severe flooding in recent years, resulting in the temporary submergence of roughly 100,000 square miles of land. About 500 million people in the world live on river deltas.

Published in the Sept. 20 issue of Nature Geoscience, the study was led by CU-Boulder Professor James Syvitski, who is directing a $4.2 million effort funded by the National Science Foundation to model large-scale global processes on Earth like erosion and flooding. Known as the Community Surface Dynamic Modeling System, or CSDMS, the effort involves hundreds of scientists from dozens of federal labs and universities around the nation.

The Nature Geoscience authors predict that global delta flooding could increase by 50 percent under current projections of about 18 inches in sea level rise by the end of the century as forecast by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The flooding will increase even more if the capture of sediments upstream from deltas by reservoirs and other water diversion projects persists and prevents the growth and buffering of the deltas, according to the study.

“We argue that the world’s low-lying deltas are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, either from their feeding rivers or from ocean storms,” said CU-Boulder Research Associate Albert Kettner, a co-author on the study at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and member of the CSDMS team. “This study shows there are a host of human-induced factors that already cause deltas to sink much more rapidly than could be explained by sea level alone.”

Other study co-authors include CU-Boulder’s Irina Overeem, Eric Hutton and Mark Hannon, G. Robert Brakenridge of Dartmouth College, John Day of Louisiana State University, Charles Vorosmarty of City College of New York, Yoshiki Saito of the Geological Survey of Japan, Liviu Giosan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Robert Nichols of the University of Southampton in England.

The team used satellite data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which carried a bevy of radar instruments that swept more than 80 percent of Earth’s surface during a 12-day mission of the space shuttle Endeavour in 2000. The researchers compared the SRTM data with historical maps published between 1760 and 1922.

“Every year, about 10 million people are being affected by storm surges,” said CU-Boulder’s Overeem, also an INSTAAR researcher and CSDMS scientist. “Hurricane Katrina may be the best example that stands out in the United States, but flooding in the Asian deltas of Irrawaddy in Myanmar and the Ganges-Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh have recently claimed thousands of lives as well.”

The researchers predict that similar disasters could potentially occur in the Pearl River delta in China and the Mekong River delta in Vietnam, where thousands of square miles are below sea level and the regions are hit by periodic typhoons.

“Although humans have largely mastered the everyday behaviour of lowland rivers, they seem less able to deal with the fury of storm surges that can temporarily raise sea level by three to 10 meters (10 to 33 feet),” wrote the study authors. “It remains alarming how often deltas flood, whether from land or from sea, and the trend seems to be worsening.”

“We are interested in how landscapes and seascapes change over time, and how materials like water, sediments and nutrients are transported from one place to another,” said Syvitski a geological sciences professor at CU-Boulder. “The CSDMS effort will give us a better understanding of Earth and allow us to make better predictions about areas at risk to phenomena like deforestation, forest fires, land-use changes and the impacts of climate change.”

###

For more information on INSTAAR visit http://instaar.colorado.edu/index.html. For more information on CSDMS visit http://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Main_Page.

Check out ‘Interactive Flood Maps’ here and see the consequences of storm surge for yourself…

http://flood.firetree.net/

Here’s a link to a projection of sea level rise of 10 metres in The Mekong Delta of Vietnam and Cambodia, including the Tonlé Sap.

Workshop, regional coalition put Mekong dams on agenda

Posted on by
Reply

Written by Sebastian Strangio and Khouth Sophak Chakrya | Phnom Penh Post | Wednesday, 17 June 2009

“The Don Sahong dam threatens the rich local subsistence and commercial fisheries in Laos and could also impact fisheries in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, with repercussions for food security and the region’s economy,” said Yumiko Kura, regional programme manager of the World Fish Centre, during the workshop.

Touch Seang Tana, a Cambodian specialist on dolphins and chairman of the Commission for Mekong River Dolphin Conservation and Ecotourism Development, said that the blocking of fish migration routes will lead to a sharp reduction in fish catches in Stung Treng and Kratie provinces.

“Dams create hydropower energy that will increase the [country's] economic potential, but they could also destroy environmental resources,” he said.

The daylong workshop, organised by the Rivers Coalition in Cambodia and the government’s Fisheries Administration, was to “share information and increase awareness” about the dam and its likely effects, according to a statement released Monday.

Read article…

Visit Phnom Penh Post Online