Cambodia: Progress and Challenges since 1991

23. The Mekong: Uncertain Future of a Great River

The Mekong 369 369 23 THE MEKONG Uncertain Future of a Great River Milton Osborne “Without doubt, no other river, over such a length, has a more singular or remarkable character” Francis Garnier (1839–1873) explorer of the Mekong When, at a meeting held in Phnom Penh in April 2011 the Lao government bowed to pressure from Vietnam and Cambodia and agreed to suspend until 2011 its decision to construct a dam at Xayaburi, a location on the Mekong River between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the issue of the river’s future was brought into sharp relief. For what was involved in the discussion that took place in Phnom Penh was an unresolved debate about how one of the world’s great rivers would function in the future. Was it to continue as a major resource of food for the populations living in the Lower Mekong Basin or LMB (The area which drains into the Mekong in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, but not Burma which ‘tilts’ away from the river)? Or was it to become a source of hydroelectric power, even if this meant destroying the combined bounty of fish and agricultural production that the Mekong has rendered up over thousands of years? At the time of writing, in June 2011, this issue remains far from resolved. In the text that 23 Cambodia_Progress 3/6/12, 10:41 AM 369 370 Milton Osborne follows, I have attempted to place contemporary developments in their historical context and to argue that embracing the second alternative — the development of hydropower as the choice for the future — carries with it risks of the most fundamental kind for the 60 million inhabitants of the LMB who are so reliant on the river. THE RIVER AND ITS HISTORY The Mekong, a name that is a contraction from the Thai Me Nam Khan, the ‘Mother of the Waters’, is frequently and correctly spoken of as Southeast Asia’s longest river. For some 2,250 kilometres, or 46 per cent, of its total 4,900 kilometres length does indeed flow through Southeast Asia. But the other 44 per cent of its course runs through Chinese territory, since it rises high in the eastern plateau of Tibet, at an elevation of over 5,000 metres, and flows east and then south through Yunnan province. This is a fact of capital importance for contemporary discussion of efforts to exploit the river for hydroelectric power, as China has already constructed several dams on the river where it runs through Yunnan. Overall, in terms of its length, the Mekong is the twelfth longest river in the world. In terms of the amount of water that pours out of its several mouths in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta into the South China Sea, it fluctuates between being the tenth or eighth largest river in the world by volume discharged. These facts have only become widely known relatively recently, certainly by comparison with other great rivers of the world, such as the Nile and the Amazon. For although sections of the Mekong River were, of course, always known to those who lived beside it, it was not until the 1860s that the first scientific expedition surveyed its course from what is today southern Vietnam to the area in Yunnan province around the modern Chinese city of Jinghong. This was the French Mekong Expedition — the Commission d’Exploration du Mékong — led by Commander Doudart de Lagrée, but which is most closely associated with the memory of his second-in command, Francis Garnier. He, like Lagrée, was a naval officer then serving in the newly acquired French colonial territories in Indochina, and was both a man of action and the possessor of a lively intellect. It is to Garnier that we owe the most detailed account of the expedition’s journey and its accomplishments. Before the French expedition set out from Saigon (modern Ho Chi Minh City), in June 1866, Western knowledge about the river was both sparse and fragmentary. A Dutch expedition had travelled from Phnom Penh to Vientiane in the 1640s led by Gerritt van Wuysthoff, who wrote an account of this journey. But this account remained virtually unknown until the nineteenth century, and it was, in any event, not accompanied by useful maps. The 23 Cambodia_Progress 3/6/12, 10:41 AM 370 The Mekong 371 famed ‘re-discoverer’ of the great Angkor ruins, Henri Mouhot, appears to...