CHIANG RAI, Thailand - Bean sprout farmer Orapin Waotikon describes life along the Mekong River as “throwing the dice”. At the crack of dawn every day, the 56-year-old woman heads to the river bank in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai to water the sprouts that she plants in containers laid out on the sand.
The abrupt changes in water flow are not a natural phenomenon, but the product of hydropower dams upriver that store and release water according to electricity production needs. Thai fisherman Kong Kayankarn, 69, has seen dwindling catches owing to the hydropower dams. Here, he tries his luck in the section of the Mekong next to Ubon Ratchathani province. ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
“The biggest challenge for the Mekong River is really the cumulative development of all these projects,” said Ms Courtney Weatherby, deputy director of the United States-based Stimson Centre’s South-east Asia programme. “The impacts of one dam can be relatively well understood and projected and modelled.
This is on top of the race among lower Mekong states to shape the basin’s infrastructure to their advantage.Cambodia, trying to reduce its dependence on Vietnamese ports, plans to build a 180km navigation canal to link its portion of the Mekong to the coastal province of Kep by the Gulf of Thailand.
China and Myanmar, meanwhile, are not bound by requirements to notify the commission as they are only dialogue partners of the MRC. Both are, however, members of the six-country Lancang-Mekong Cooperation , a broader Chinese-backed development initiative. The Mekong is known as the Lancang in China. Through the LMC, Beijing has funded more than US$80 million worth of development projects in downstream countries.
Dams have exacerbated the damage already wrought by overfishing, in some cases by making it easier for poachers. “They say ‘you are only a woman, don’t try to be smart’,” she says. “Sometimes they threaten me. They say, ‘you should be careful’.” Snubbed by local fishers, she travels two hours to another village if she wants to buy fish.
Stung Treng was where a 300kg giant freshwater stingray was found in 2022 and later recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world’s largest freshwater fish. In this way, Mr Sophol was paid US$600 for looking after the giant stingray until Ms Seila’s team got there.
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