AsiaLIFE

The Mekong dominates the region through which it flows. Agriculture and fishing are dependent upon the river. Yet it is vulnerable to environmental concerns, from upstream damming to global climate change. What will be the impact upon traditional life in the region? Words by Thomas Maresca.

It’s a festive Saturday in the tiny Mekong Delta hamlet of An Thanh, Vietnam, located two hours down the muddy Co Chien River from the city of Vinh Long. Earlier in the morning there was a wedding, and now an unexpected foreign visitor has arrived, giving the villagers an excuse to prolong the jolly atmosphere.

“Where are you from?” Truong Van Sau, a cheerful, red-faced farmer, asks his surprised guest (me). “The Soviet Union?” (First impression: News travels slowly here.)

While lunch is quickly assembled – a chicken slaughtered, low-hanging longan fruit grabbed in bunches from trees, a relative dispatched to procure rice wine – Sau shows off his rice paddy. It’s a third of a hectare plot, lush with green rice plants shimmering in the bright noontime sun.

Sau’s rice is 47 days old. When it reaches 90 days, he will harvest it with his wife and son over the course of a few backbreaking days of labour. It will be sold, processed, exported. And then, they’ll do it all over again.

“It’s been the same way since my great-grandparents were here,” he says. “And it will continue the way it always has.”

Some things have changed, of course. Electric lines are strung around the small hamlet. Sau’s home has a television, DVD player, and karaoke machine. But these seem mere details, subordinate to the powerful rhythms of everyday life. Time moves differently here, in a circle rather than a straight line – planting and harvesting and replanting, the wet season and the dry season, the rise and fall of the river.

“For the month before harvest we are so busy we don’t have time to breathe,” says Sau. “But then we can rest for a while and drink wine with our friends. This is our circle of life. This is our circle of happiness.”

All About the River

Life in An Thanh, as everywhere in this region, depends, more than anything else, on one thing – the health of the Mekong River.

The river’s annual cycle of flood and retreat is known to scientists as its “pulse”. It’s a perfectly apt description of how vital it is to some 60 million people in the Lower Mekong Basin, who rely on it for sustenance from fishing, agriculture and horticulture. It is the heartbeat and lifeblood of the entire region.

Although usually thought of as a Southeast Asian river, at least 44 percent of the Mekong flows through China’s Yunnan Province, where it is known as the Lancang. It is here that the first major changes to the river began taking place.

Since the 1980s Chinese engineers have begun altering the riverscape, both by dynamiting rapids to open up trade routes, and more significantly, embarking on a massive hydropower dam-building project to help feed their ever-growing energy needs.

China has already built three dams on the river in Yunnan Province, and two others are underway, including the world’s tallest at Xiaowan. Its reservoir will be able to store more water than all of Southeast Asia’s reservoirs combined.

These are part of a planned hydroelectric ‘cascade’ of dams along the Mekong that will provide unprecedented control of the river’s flow. Chinese authorities tout this as a positive benefit, pointing out they will be able to top its level up in the dry season, and lower it in the rainy season to help prevent flooding.

Other observers are seriously concerned. A 2009 United Nations Environmental Programme report claims the Chinese dams may “pose a considerable threat to the river,” and warns of "changes in river flow volume and timing, water quality deterioration and loss of biodiversity."

Thailand, Cambodia and Laos are also reviewing plans for major hydropower dam construction on the mainstream of the river below China. Laos, in particular, is reported to have over 70 dam projects in the works.

Milton Osborne, a professor at the Australian National University and author of several books and articles, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Mekong River. His recent report for the Lowy Institute, ‘The Mekong: River Under Threat’ presents a dire picture of the potential consequences of these mainstream dams. “The future of the Mekong as a great source of food, both through fish and agriculture, is in serious jeopardy,” he warns.

The fear is that an interruption to the river’s pulse, its annual cycle of flood and retreat, will throw off the delicate balance of the entire river ecosystem. For fish, the timing of the river’s flow is a key trigger for their migration and breeding. Some 80 percent of the Mekong’s fish are migratory, often travelling hundreds of kilometres at a time.

As for agriculture, the river’s floodwaters carry nutrient-rich sediment from upstream that fertilise the growing fields in the dry season. The floods also act as a cleanser, ridding the soil of alkaloids, flushing away salt water, and clearing the fields of pests such as rats.

Osborne told AsiaLIFE that the impact of the dams on fish stocks “will affect Vietnam, and particularly the population living in the Delta, though not as dramatically as could be expected to happen in both Cambodia and Laos.” In Cambodia, 70 percent of the protein in the nation’s diet comes from fish.

A Changing Climate

While hardly unique to the Mekong, the threat of climate change is also looming. The World Bank cites Cambodia as one of the countries most at risk from flooding due to climate change.

Some effects of climate change are already evident. The Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s great lake and the source of most of the country’s aquaculture, has already seen drastically lower water levels and a difference in the size and yield of fish, at least some of which can be attributed to climate change.

Vietnam is also at great risk from another effect of climate change.

“Clearly, if sea levels were to rise this would be of great significance for the Mekong Delta,” says Osborne. A 2007 UN Human Development Report concludes that forecasts for the Delta region are “particularly grim.”

The report states: “In 20 years an estimated 45 percent of the Delta will be exposed to sea water and crop damage through flooding. Rice crops are expected to shrink by 9 per cent. By 2050, much of the Delta will be completely inundated for most of the year.”

Simon Benedikter, a research fellow with the University of Bonn’s Centre for Development Research (working in conjunction with the WISDOM water management project at Can Tho University in Vietnam) points out that the mingling of seawater with freshwater is already becoming a major concern. “Salinity intrusion is a very big problem in the coastal areas,” he says, “and will be even more problematic in the future as it moves further up the Delta.”

The changes to the river are having an impact on wildlife as well. The Greater Mekong Region is one of the most biodiverse areas on earth. The World Wildlife Fund announced over 1,000 new species discovered in the last decade alone. But many river species are close to extinction, among them the Irawaddy Dolphins and the Mekong Catfish, the largest freshwater fish in the world reaching a size of over three metres long and a weight of 3,000kg.

Taking a Regional Perspective

The dangers to the Mekong are multifaceted and far-reaching. Solutions are needed to address the problem on many fronts. Greener and more efficient ways to produce energy, regulation and enforcement of pollution controls and actionable water management plans are all parts of the puzzle.

But one major hurdle that remains is the fractured governance of the Mekong. What one country does to the Mekong has ramifications for all of the countries that share the river, but there is yet to be the kind of cooperation that can place long-term regional interests ahead of short-term, national ones.

The Mekong River Commission, established in 1996, is a body composed of representatives of the governments of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. While it conducts a great deal of valuable research and river monitoring, it is limited in its authority – most notably because China is not a member of the Commission (nor is Myanmar) and has no obligation to consult the member countries about its hydropower projects.

Rivers International, a US-based organisation, is advocating for greater transparency on the issue of Mekong development, particularly dams. The organisation says: “In the Mekong region these mainstream dams are being examined under a veil of secrecy. In a world facing a growing food and water crisis, working together to protect and share the river’s rich resources, rather than wrecking them, should be a high priority for the region’s decision-makers.”

Grassroots activism has been muted to this point, although there is a growing voice of opposition to development on the Mekong. Last year, more than 15,000 people from within signed a “Save the Mekong” petition urging governments to abandon plans for hydropower dams.

Ultimately, the threats facing the Mekong – hydropower dams, climate change, pollution – are cumulative. “These are cross-cutting issues,” says Benedikter. “Climate change tends to stand very separately, but in my opinion, it should be more integrated into water-resource management.”

The power of the Mekong has been evident for centuries. But like any living organism, it is also vulnerable. Its resiliency is being tested in ways it never has before. Just how much the Mekong can withstand, no one knows for certain. It’s a question hopefully we won’t have to answer.

A Last Shot

Back in An Thanh, the issues facing the Mekong seem distant, at least for another day. The sun is going down on the impromptu afternoon party. It’s time to make the return trip to Vinh Long.

A last toast. There’s a nickname for the rice wine we’ve been enjoying all day, one that reflects the harder side of the cycle of life in the Mekong – the gruelling labour, the constant vulnerability to the whims of nature, weather, and fate.

Raising a clear shot glass in the setting sun, Sau, the rice farmer, pauses for a moment – “Tears of the homeland,” he says.