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WATER POLITICS

Via The Economist, a series of three articles on the Mekong River.  The first looks at

GUO, the driver, pulls his car to a merciful halt high above a crevasse: time for a cigarette, and after seven hours of shuddering along narrow, twisting roads, time for his passengers to check that their fillings remain in place. Lighting up, he steps out of the car and dons a cloth cap and jacket: sunny, early-summer days are still brisk 3,500 metres above sea level. Mr Guo is an impish little dumpling of a man, bald, brown-toothed and jolly. He is also an anomaly: a Shanghainese in northern Yunnan who opted to stay with his local bride rather than return to his booming hometown. 

The ribbon of brown water cutting swiftly through the gorge below is rich with snowmelt. With few cars passing, its echoing sound fills the air. In the distance, the Hengduan mountains slump under their snowpack as if crumpled beneath its weight. Mr Guo recalls the drivers who have taken a switchback too quickly and fallen to their deaths in the valley below. He tells of workers who lost their footing or whose harnesses failed while building a bridge near his home town of Cizhong, 20 or 30 kilometres south. He pulls hard on his cigarette. “This river”, he says, “has taken so many lives.”

It has sustained many more. From trickles of meltwater in arid Qinghai, the river grows quickly as it passes through Tibet and Yunnan. Leaving China, and in doing so changing its name from the Lancang to the Mekong, it descends through a landscape ripening into jungle. Swollen by rainforest tributaries, it defines the Myanmar-Laos border and most of the Laos-Thailand border. It cuts Cambodia in two, and then splits into distributaries in south-western Vietnam, the lush, claustral delta landscape opposite in every way to the craggy austerity where it began.

The Mekong region is Asia’s rice bowl: in 2014 lower Mekong countries (Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam) produced more than 100m tonnes of rice, around 15% of the world’s total. The region’s fertile soil depends on nutrient-rich sediment that the Mekong carries downriver, mainly during the rainy season from June to October; more than half the sediment in central Cambodia comes from China. The river and the nutrients it brings also support the world’s biggest inland fishery, accounting for a quarter of the global freshwater catch, feeding tens of millions of people.

The region boasts remarkable biodiversity; only the vast basins of the Congo and the Amazon compare to or surpass it. There are more than 20,000 types of plant and nearly 2,500 animal species; freshwater dolphins and giant catfish; spiders 30 centimetres across and, in a limestone cavern in Thailand, a day-glo pink, cyanide-secreting millipede. The human diversity is striking, too: Tibetan monks pray; Burmese traders buy and sell; Cambodian fishermen cast nets; Thai farmers reap; Vietnamese markets float. The history is as rich as the soil. The Buddha smiled while resting at the northern Lao city of Luang Prabang. Angkor Wat on the Mekong-fed Tonle Sap lake was among the biggest cities of the preindustrial world. The Khmer empire that built it dominated South-East Asia for longer than there have been Europeans in the Americas.

Since its French colonial days the Mekong has been more of a backwater. But the life-changing development seen elsewhere in Asia is spreading into this mostly rural world. Pickup trucks are replacing bullock-carts, karaoke bars dot lonely two-lane roads, fishermen can catch up on soap-operas at night. People are getting richer, and their lives longer.

And as modernity comes into the region, it also seeks to take something out. Countries see a new resource in the Mekong: not the support it offers rich networks of life, but the simple fact of its flow. The hydroelectric dams now built on and planned for the Mekong amount to one of the largest-ever interventions in a river’s course. As its currents are rechannelled down copper conduits to power far-off cities the river itself will be trapped behind a series of concrete walls. Its fisheries, agriculture and biodiversity will suffer; the lives lived on its banks will be reshaped with scant regard for the feelings of those who lead them

In teaching his students that change was the one true constant, the philosopher Heraclitus told them that no one ever steps in the same river twice. At the second step both man and river are not what they once were. In space and in time, from narrow gorges to salty seas and from great empires to impoverished peasantry, the river at Mr Guo’s feet encompasses more change than most. These new developments, though, feel like something more profound. Flow means change, but it also brings identity, because it embodies continuity. As the river is stilled, precious identities risk being lost for ever.

The second examines the changes brought about by China’s dams:

THE scent of woodsmoke from Mr Guo’s cast-iron stove hangs heavy in the brisk evening air. The household generator is switched off for the night, and the low kitchen in which his family and two guests gather is made cozy by the light of kerosene lamps. His wife brings a succession of bowls to the table: steamed rice, chunks cut from a salted pig’s leg that hangs above the stove, lettuce braised with garlic, scraps of beef sautéed with chilies, and tsampa, a roast barley powder favoured by his ethnically Tibetan family. His mother-in-law serves a medicinal-tasting infusion made from local leaves and berries, as well as eggshell cups of local wine. The wine tastes as though it was made by someone who knew only two things about wine: it is supposed to be red, and it is supposed to get you drunk

French missionaries brought grapes and the Gospel to Yunnan in the late 19th century; wine has been made in Cizhong ever since. They left a more enduring monument too: a sombre stone church with a charmingly incongruous Tibetan-style roof that sweeps skyward at its edges. A priest from Inner Mongolia holds masses there for ethnic-Tibetan Catholics. Cizhong spreads out from the church like the bottom half of a Chagall painting: donkeys wander the stone streets; ramshackle houses squat along alleyways; vineyards and rice paddies frame the view.

But that is about to change. A little way downriver, a state-owned power utility is building the 990-megawatt Wunonglong dam. In 1995 the Manwan dam, some 600km farther downstream, became the first to stem the river’s flow. Since then five more dams have been finished along its Chinese reach; the Wunonglong dam is one of a further 14 being planned or built there.

China’s Communist Party has long been keen on dams. At least 86,000 have been built over the past six decades, providing 282 gigawatts (GW) of installed hydroelectric capacity by 2014. The government is building yet more to curb the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. By 2020 it wants an astonishing 350GW of installed hydropower capacity; in the European Union that would be enough to meet about three-quarters of total electricity needs. The dam at Wunonglong, about 300 metres long and more than 100 metres high, will provide a smidgen less than one of those extra gigawatts. The other 13 are expected to add 15.1GW more.

Downriver countries intend to build another 11 large dams on the Mekong, with dozens more planned for its tributaries. In 20 years the Mekong could well be dammed from Tibet to just above Phnom Penh, where the delta begins. In no other large river basin in the world is the planned rate of growth of hydropower as great.

The dams will change the quality of the water in the river and the rate at which it flows. Some of this change could be for the better. Dams can prevent flooding by regulating the flow of water downstream. But some Mekong riverbank agriculture would not welcome too steady a flow. Increasing water in the dry season would shrink riverbeds, leaving less space for crops—millions of Mekong-basin dwellers grow vegetables on riverbanks. Reducing water in the rainy season produces smaller floodplains with less sediment deposited in them, impoverishing the soil.

According to International Rivers, an environmental NGO, the full cascade of dams planned for the Lancang would trap nearly all of the sediment coming from China, cutting the water’s sediment load in half. That will be bad for soils and bad for fish; the sediments provide the river’s nutrients. And the dams lower down could worsen the problem; the clear, “hungry” water that flows from them in spates will carry away existing sediment in riverbanks and riverbeds. Some of that will be deposited farther still downstream; some will wash uselessly out to sea.

Those lower dams will also make things yet harder for the nutrient-deprived fish. The 11 proposed in Laos and Cambodia could block the migration of around 70% of the Mekong’s commercial fish catch. Interfering with the fish’s feeding and reproduction to that extent would imperil the food security of populations across the lower Mekong basin, where the average person eats some 60kg of freshwater fish per year, more than 18 times what is on the menu in Europe or America. Considering how poor many of the people here are, replacing fish as a primary protein source is virtually impossible.

Dams restrict the movement of fish; they force movement on people. Along the road leading out of Cizhong, past the dormitories housing the construction workers for the Wunonglong dam, He Zhenghai, a friend of Mr Guo, points to a denuded spot where a village used to be. A few kilometres farther on he points out the resettlement: rows of squat, charmless concrete structures plonked down along the side of the road, near nothing.

Estimates by NGOs of the total number of Chinese people resettled because of dam projects exceed 20m. Dams on the Lancang have already added thousands more, mostly poor rural farmers, to the total. In 2013 the compensation received on relocation was about 80,000 yuan ($12,500). Some farmers complain that they have been resettled on sheer hillsides ill-suited to farming and, to add insult to injury, chronically short of water.

The Wunonglong dam will inundate Yanmen, a nearby village whose residents will be resettled on Cizhong’s rice paddies. And this means that, in a way, Cizhong, too, will vanish. Brian Eyler, deputy director of the South-East Asia programme at the Stimson Centre, an American think-tank, says Yanmen sits above Cizhong in China’s administrative league tables, meaning that after resettlement Cizhong will be renamed Yanmen, losing its name along with much of its charm.

The third looks at Laos’ hydropower ambitions:

AT HUAY XAI on the Thailand-Laos border, around 1,000km downriver from Mr Guo’s house in Cizhong, a sampan’s tubercular engine kicks in with a wheeze, a gag and a violent sneeze of black smoke. As the motor stammers a tiny conductor terrorises the boat, calling brusquely for tickets, chastising people for where and how they sit, shouting at the pilot to get a move on. As the boat pulls away she jumps off, smoking and yelling the whole time. Some of the locals immediately set about the business of napping, using rice sacks as pillows. Others spread bolts of fabric to picnic on, pulling out plastic bags of grilled chicken, sticky rice, bamboo shoots and tiny, floral South-East Asian oranges. The tourists, meanwhile, open cans of beer—except for the Brits, who open bottles of rotgut Thai whiskey. Tourists and locals alike start the journey staring at their phones. Eventually reception wanes and they are forced to gaze out at the wonder on all sides. 

By the time it reaches Huay Xai the Mekong has already run more than the entire length of the Rhine and descended more than 3,000 metres—handily more than the Rhine manages. It still has almost two Rhine-lengths to go—but along that journey it will only drop a further 400 metres. It is a lowland river now, lush and steady. The evening chill of Mr Guo’s kitchen has been replaced by ripe, vaguely fetid South-East Asian warmth.

About two hours into the two-day journey east from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang, the boat pulls over to a muddy shore, distinguished only by a concrete staircase cut into the side of a mountain. As the boat approaches people suddenly appear out of the jungle at the top of the stairs. The scene repeats itself with minor variations throughout the journey: a muddy path rather than a staircase, a rickety little jetty or two. A couple of hours before the boat pulls in to regally sleepy Luang Prabang, it passes the Pak Ou caves: two caverns in a mountainside from which hundreds of Buddha statues brought by devotees stare down at passing boats.

Just downstream from Luang Prabang, the $3.5 billion, 1.3GW Xayaburi dam is rising—one of nine this country of 6.8m mostly rural, mostly poor people plans for the Mekong mainstream. Laos wants hydropower to be its main source of revenue by 2025: it plans to sell its capacity to neighbouring countries. The Thai government has agreed to buy 95% of Xayaburi’s power. Six Thai banks have financed the dam and a Thai construction firm is building it.

Laos’s downstream neighbours are far less enthusiastic. Cambodia (two dams of its own planned) and Vietnam (no suitable sites for dams at all), worried about the impacts that the Xayaburi dam will have on fisheries and water flow, have lodged objections with the Mekong River Commission that was set up by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in 1995. The MRC is meant to facilitate co-operation among the countries that share the watershed; China and Myanmar have the status of “dialogue partners”.

Environmental groups warn that by turning a free-flowing river into a series of reservoirs the upstream Lao dams could wipe out the Mekong’s two largest freshwater species: the giant catfish and the giant pangasius. Similar warnings have been raised about the Don Sahong dam—which would span the Mekong across the breathtakingly beautiful Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands) region near Laos’s border with Cambodia—and about Cambodia’s giant Sambor dam, which may destroy one of the last remaining habitats of the Irrawaddy dolphin.

The Xayaburi dam’s builders have redesigned its sluice gates to allow more nutrient-rich sediment to flow downstream, and widened its fish pass to accommodate more fish of different species. The Lao government says these tweaks will alleviate the worst harms. Environmentalists are less certain. Fish passes in dams have been repeatedly found not to live up to promises made for them, particularly when fish must pass through multiple sets, as they would if Laos builds all its planned dams.

The Mekong might survive a few big mainstream dams, but a dozen—plus dozens more on its tributaries—present a qualitatively different sort of threat. This highlights a recurring theme of Mekong development: dam-builders tend to assess the impact of each dam individually; NGOs pay more attention to the cumulative effect of multiple dams. The NGOs also worry that with every new dam built, further dam-building becomes more normal, and the next project thus becomes easier to justify.

Environmentalists think both that such synergies make the harm done by dams greater than governments claim, and that the benefits are overestimated. Touting hydropower as “green” because it can be used in the place of fossil-fuel derived electricity overlooks external costs such as compensation and relocation, lost agricultural productivity and biodiversity and lowered water quality. And although benefits may be large (especially for electricity exporters), they are hardly overwhelming, especially in the context of broader development. Power demand in the region is expected to more than double between now and 2025—having already doubled from 2005. According to Richard Cronin, a Mekong specialist at the Stimson Centre, an American think-tank, the nine Lao and two Cambodian dams currently discussed would provide just 6-8% of the total electricity needs of the lower Mekong basin by 2030, with most of the power going to Thailand. “For that,” Mr Cronin asks, “you’re going to kill the river?”

Pressure from downstream countries and international NGOs has slowed Laos’s progress on its next two dams, the Don Sahong and the Pak Beng, and has forced developers to spend more money studying potential downstream harms. But Laos is a poor country with few natural resources that sees hydropower as its route to development. In the absence of better options, concerned citizens and the governments of the downstream neighbours may be able to do little more than delay Laos.

For now the Mekong remains blissfully unobstructed as it passes from Laos into Cambodia—except for the bloom of tiny islands that give Si Phan Don its name. People live on just a few of these islands. Some cater to tourists happy to spend a few days rafting the occasional rapids and listening to the Mekong rush past. But many are little more than a clump of rock and mud on which sprays of rivergrass and shrubs have taken root, still green against flowing brown. Past the waterfalls roiling the water into spume the river relaxes again. On clear days it becomes a hazy mirror, the stark blue above turning to indistinct brightness below.