China's Mekong River Dams Promise Profound Environmental Changes

[hatrack]

SINGAPORE — "China's damming of the Mekong River to help power its economy could pose a grave threat within a decade to the livelihoods of millions of Southeast Asian farmers and fishers, an Australian researcher said on Tuesday. Evidence suggests that completion of two dams on China's stretch of the 4,800 km (3,000 mile) waterway, along with work to make the Mekong more navigable, has triggered damaging changes in the river's flow patterns, said Milton Osborne, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra.

The Mekong fell to record lows in the recent dry season. Sudden drops in the river's levels stranded boats. In impoverished Cambodia, the fish catch dropped by almost 50 percent after a 15 percent decline the year before, Osborne told Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

"Many of these problems, which have been identified not just by mad-eyed greenies but by serious scientists, are a cause for concern," Osborne said. Seventy percent of the 70 million people living in the Mekong Basin, an area the size of France and Germany, depend on the fish that teem in the river or on the crops that it irrigates.

Although experts would not be able to deliver a definitive verdict for a decade, their current projections were worrying, Osborne said. The Mekong was on a knife-edge. "The cumulative effects of the developments that have taken place plus the additional physical changes that are planned with more dams in China and the extension of river clearances further downstream into Laos mean that there is reason to be concerned about the Mekong's future," Osborne said."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-30/s_25393.asp

[Massacure]

1. Can't the Chinese also construct a fish run along side the damn?

[James T. Kirk]

2. The Mekong River flows through Vietnam.

;-)
It reminds me that John Kerry was in Vietnam, too.
:7