THE COMPANY'S bulldozers came early one morning and pushed Ota Khami's wooden stilted house into muddy waters swirling towards the Mekong, the 4345-kilometre river whose roaring currents, waterfalls and gorges have long enchanted travellers and inspired explorers.
Ota Khami's seven children and wife wept as the giant machines crushed his mango, cashew and jackfruit trees.
''We couldn't do anything - our lives were ruined,'' says the 55-year-old villager from north-east Cambodia.
Now, 12 months later, the land that Ota Khami says he slashed and burned in the late 1990s to make his home alongside the Sesan River near the border with Laos has been turned into a canal next to a 75-metre-high concrete wall, one of 11 hydroelectric projects being built, under construction or planned in an area known as the Mekong basin in Cambodia and Laos.
Conservationists, politicians and at least one prime minister are warning that the quest for hydro power for booming urban centres in China and south-east Asia is threatening the food supply of more than 40 million people, including millions in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam's food bowl.
Environmental activist Kraisak Choonhavan, a former chairman of Thailand's Senate foreign affairs committee, calls the building of the dams ''a disaster of epic proportions'' that threatens to shatter declarations of unity among member states of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean).
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung warns that 27 percent of his country's GDP, 90 percent of its rice exports and 60 percent of its seafood exports are at risk, mainly because disrupted sediment flows could destroy the integrity of the Mekong Delta.
THEIR HOMES have been flooded in the quest for hydro power. Now the people of the Mekong face losing their food source too amid warnings that a catastrophe is about to unfold.
VIDEO, Full story here
http://www.watoday.com.au/interactive/2015/cry-me-a-river/
Ota Khami's seven children and wife wept as the giant machines crushed his mango, cashew and jackfruit trees.
''We couldn't do anything - our lives were ruined,'' says the 55-year-old villager from north-east Cambodia.
Now, 12 months later, the land that Ota Khami says he slashed and burned in the late 1990s to make his home alongside the Sesan River near the border with Laos has been turned into a canal next to a 75-metre-high concrete wall, one of 11 hydroelectric projects being built, under construction or planned in an area known as the Mekong basin in Cambodia and Laos.
Conservationists, politicians and at least one prime minister are warning that the quest for hydro power for booming urban centres in China and south-east Asia is threatening the food supply of more than 40 million people, including millions in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam's food bowl.
Environmental activist Kraisak Choonhavan, a former chairman of Thailand's Senate foreign affairs committee, calls the building of the dams ''a disaster of epic proportions'' that threatens to shatter declarations of unity among member states of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean).
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung warns that 27 percent of his country's GDP, 90 percent of its rice exports and 60 percent of its seafood exports are at risk, mainly because disrupted sediment flows could destroy the integrity of the Mekong Delta.
Cry me a river
THEIR HOMES have been flooded in the quest for hydro power. Now the people of the Mekong face losing their food source too amid warnings that a catastrophe is about to unfold.
VIDEO, Full story here
http://www.watoday.com.au/interactive/2015/cry-me-a-river/
This is just so typical of how dysfunctional Asean is. Not one member respects any other member within this 'club'. Proper environmental studies are either never carried out or are discarded at the whim of whoever thinks they can gain most in the short term from any project.
Posted by Logic on June 27, 2015 11:39