Expert calls for cooperation

They must address accelerated depletion, environmental degradation, threats to biodiversity and tensions among multiple users by installing massive interriver water transfer projects, an environmen¬tal expert said.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the New Delhibased Centre for Policy Research, said the massive inter watertransfer projects in the Mekong are damaging the delicate ecosystem.

He said the massive projects installed by China start at the Tibetan plateau, the source of the river.

These projects carry seeds of interriparian conflict in Asia. Riparian neighbours have increasingly viewed with disquiet Chinese hydroengineering projects on the vast Tibetan plateau. Conflict over such projects could easily spill across international borders, he added.

Unmindful of the political and environmental impact of its projects, China's three existing dams have already affected Laos's tourism industry, and are beginning to impact fishing and farming in all the downstream basin states.

For instance, China's first dam on the Mekong, the Manwan Dam, was completed in 1996, resulting in undesirable fluctuation in downstream water levels.

Its latest dam, Jinhong was completed in mid2008. Some environmentalists have blamed the Chinese dams for the summer flooding in northern Thailand and Laos this year.

China, after completing three dams upstream on the Mekong, is now building at least four more on that river, inflaming passions downstream in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.

When fully complete, the cascade of Chinesebuilt dams, with a combined installed generating capacity of 15,500 megawatts, would tap 60 per cent of the Mekong's flow.

"Beijing has not only spurned invitation to join regional institu¬tions like the Mekong River Commission - comprising Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam - but also continued to drag its feet on being transparent about its hydroengineering projects on the Upper Mekong," he added.

Beijing has been willing to participate in infrastructure projects in the lower basin but has been loath to take its riparian neighbours into confidence on its upstream development projects and their potentially adverse transboundary effects, he said.

China's unilateralist approach on exploiting the Mekong has only encouraged others to follow suit, as illustrated by Vietnamese dam projects.

Chellaney said the "most critical political ramification" of China's ongoing damming of the Mekong is that before long, Beijing will be able to control the quantity of water released to downstream countries, with the worstaffected being the states farthest downstream - Vietnam and Cambodia.

But China is not to be singled out for blame. The Thailand government of former prime minister Samak Sundaravej recently signed an agreement to build an embank¬ment in the middle of the Mekong in a bid to prevent flash floods from the waters released by China's dam.

Samak said the flash floods that occurred in August in the two northeastern provinces of Nong Khai and Nakhon Phanom were caused by the massive amount of water flow from China's dam. He said this embankment project would reduce the water pressure flowing into Thailand.

Chellaney said the way to fore¬stall water disputes among Mekong riparian countries was to build a cooperative riverbasin arrangement involving all neigh¬bours. Such an institutional arrangement ought to be centred on transparency, information shar¬ing, pollution control, and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of transboundary rivers or under¬take projects that would diminish crossborder water flows.