Day: January 22, 2022

Laotians and Thais who depend on the Mekong River for life’s necessities — food, water, income — fear the mighty waterway may be drying up.

They say climate change may be a factor in recent droughts in the region, but believe the direct cause of their troubles are two dams China and Laos built upstream that siphon off water for agricultural and other uses before it reaches them. Experts say the dams make the impact of periodic droughts in the Mekong basin worse and rob the river of the “pulse effect” that spreads water and nutrients that support fisheries and farming.

On the Lower Mekong, fewer fish are being caught and some days water levels are so low people can walk from one shore to the other. With more dams planned in Laos to generate electricity for export, farmers and fishermen fear the worst may be yet to come.

“The Mekong River is dry because of the dams. The more dams we have, the drier the river will become. Nobody is trying to compensate us and mitigate the problem,” said a Thai villager who lives along the Mekong in Loei province.

The Mekong is one of the world’s most biodiverse river basins with more than 1,100 species of fish. As the world’s largest inland fishery, the river is a vital food source for the 70 million people in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam who live in its basin.

But the river’s flow over the last three years has been among the lowest ever recorded, with 2020 the lowest on record, according to analysis of Mekong River Commission data by the Washington-based Stimson Center’s Mekong Dam Monitor project.

The commission is an intergovernmental organization that works with the governments of the four Mekong basin countries to jointly manage the shared water resources and the sustainable development of the Mekong.

“The Mekong River is so dry and so low that local residents can walk across it at some locations like the one between Sangthong district in the Lao capital Vientiane and Pak Chom district in Thailand’s Loei province,” a member of the Thai Mekong People’s Network from Eight Provinces, who declined to be named so as to speak freely, told RFA.

The left image shows a full Mekong River in January 2019, while on the right is the Mekong in January 2022. (Planet Labs with RFA analysis)

The group represents people who live along the Mekong River in eight Thai provinces, including areas on the border with Laos, and face transboundary environmental impacts from the Xayaburi Dam hydropower project, Laos’ first dam on the Lower Mekong River.

“The Mekong River is not the same — sometimes it is low, and sometimes it is high,” a Lao fisherman, who lives on the bank of Mekong River in Xayaburi province, said. “I can catch more fish in the Xayaburi Dam reservoir than I can in the area below the dam.”

Completed in 2019, the Xayaburi Dam is the first of five planned dams on the Mekong mainstream in Laos as the government looks to generate revenue by selling the electricity from its hydropower projects to its neighbors, especially Thailand.

Laos has 78 dams in operation and has signed memoranda of understanding for 246 other hydroelectric projects, despite uncertainty about Thailand’s willingness to purchase the electricity they generate.

Planned Mekong River dams such as Luang Prabang Dam and Sanakham Dam will make the drought worse, added the fisherman, who declined to give his name.

“There will be no more fish at all. I don’t want any more dams on the river,” he said.

The lack of fish is also being felt in markets in Laos capital Vientiane.

“This year, we don’t have enough fish to sell; fish are scarce compared to last year,” a fish trader there told RFA Lao Service on Jan. 14.

Another fish trader said he hadn’t procured any fish for two weeks.

A Lao official who works closely with the Mekong River Commission told RFA that the water levels of the Mekong depend on the amount of water released by China.

“When there is little water coming down from the north, the lower region will have less water,” he said. “Sometimes, there is too much water in the north, so a lot of water is released. That’s why sometimes, the lower Mekong River region is dry and sometimes flooded.”

Recent reports by the MRC and by the Mekong Dam Monitor say the main driver of drought in the Mekong basin is lack of rainfall during the wet season, said Brian Eyler, head of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program and the Energy, Water, and Sustainability Program.

“The driving factor is a lack of rain during the wet season–no other factors can be so large to account for the gap,” he wrote in e-mailed comments.

“However, we have also determined that by and large, throughout these last three years of low flow, most dams in the Mekong basin were operated the same way as they operated in previous years of high or normal flow,” said Eyler.

The upstream practice of holding back water in relatively low-flow years takes a relatively larger amount of water out of the system, meaning that “dam restrictions during a time of drought hurt the Mekong even more,” he wrote.

The fears expressed by fishermen and farmers reflect the fact that “the impacts of these restrictions are the most noticeable nearest to the dams themselves,” added Eyler.

An Pich Hatda, head of the MRC Secretariat, said in a press release on Jan. 13 that the drought has been affecting agricultural production and the fishery industry as well as putting more pressure on livelihoods of those who live along and depend on the Mekong River.

“It’s also been threatening the ecosystem of the river,” he said. “Therefore, aggressive cooperation is important, not only cooperation from China but from all MRC members to tackle this problem.”

A representative from the Network of Community Organization Council of Seven Northeastern Provinces, another Thai group that represents people who live along the Mekong, emphasized the need for sustainable development in the Lower Mekong Region in which residents have genuine input, in comments to a Mekong-U.S. Partnership seminar on Jan. 10.

The U.S. and five lower Mekong nations launched the partnership in September 2020 as a new multilateral cooperation framework amid growing concerns about China’s expanding influence in mainland Southeast Asia.

“In the last five years, our Mekong River has had a lot of problems with the water becoming clear [because of the] lack of sediment and food for aquatic species,” the representative said.

“The water level is down by more than half, [and] the river is flooded during dry season and dry in wet season.”

“It’s not normal,” he said. “The water turns blue, affecting the ecosystem, natural resources, the environment, and the fish population.”

Reported by RFA’s Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

When North Koreans got the word to report to work for a special announcement, many expected a major announcement. Instead, they said they heard more of the same: directives about loyalty to the country and its leaders.

A day after the 6^th Politburo meeting of the 8^th Central Committee, North Korea’s government raced to tell its citizens what had transpired in emergency lectures convened nationwide in every government enterprise and neighborhood watch unit on Thursday. The answer, apparently, was not much.

“Today, they suddenly organized a special lecture session at every factory in Chongjin,” a resident of the northeastern city’s surrounding North Hamgyong province told RFA’s Korean Service Thursday.

“In most factories these days there are material shortages, so other than a few officials, the employees do not report for work. Instead, they are assigned to go make money outside the factory, but since they wanted to convene a special lecture on short notice, they activated the emergency contact network to bring all the employees in,” said the source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

North Korea’s manufacturing sector has been hit hard by the closure of the border with China and suspension of all trade that started at the beginning of the pandemic and only recently resumed. Many factories lay idle, unable to produce anything for lack of imported raw materials.

The source said that some of the employees were worried that something serious had happened to warrant calling them away from their outside jobs for a meeting on such short notice.

“But they were frustrated when the lecturer … just delivered an order from the Politburo to disseminate the decisions made during the Politburo meeting,” the source said.

The order to disseminate was the main decision that was disseminated, along with another order to show loyalty and patriotism in the workplace, according to the source.

Residents in nearby South Hamgyong province were also surprised by the lectures organized on such short notice, as these types of lectures usually take time to plan, a resident of the province told RFA.

“During the special lecture they said that the Central Committee decided on how everyone should celebrate the 80^th birth anniversary of Kim Jong Il on Feb. 16, and the 100^th birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung on April 15,” said the source, referring to the late former rulers of the country, the father and grandfather of current leader Kim Jong Un.

“They also talked about the tense atmosphere surrounding the Korean Peninsula, ordering everyone to remember that they are descendants of the Great Leader, national founder Kim Il Sung, and warriors of General Kim Jong Un, both at work and at home.”

Dropping hints

The tenseness of the atmosphere likely refers North Korea recent tests of what it calls a hypersonic missile and precision strike weapons, which have drawn condemnations from the U.S. and South Korea.

North Korea said at the Politburo meeting that it would consider resuming nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches, which have been suspended since April 2018 due to a self-imposed moratorium, state media reported Thursday.

At Wednesday’s meeting, in the presence of General Secretary Kim Jong Un, the politburo discussed countermeasures against the U.S. for its condemnations of recent weapons tests, which the report called “recklessly faulting for no reason the DPRK’s legitimate exercise of sovereignty,” the report said, blaming the Biden administration for trying to deprive North Korea of its right to self-defense.

“The Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee unanimously recognized that we should make more thorough preparation for a long-term confrontation with the U.S. imperialism,” the report said.

“It concluded to take a practical action to more reliably and effectively increase our physical strength for defending the dignity, sovereign rights and interests of our state,” it said.

The end of the self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and ICBM testing is “only a matter of time,” the RAND Corp.’s Soo Kim told RFA.

“Kim may be eyeing a window of opportunity to pressure the U.S. to change its position on the North Korean nuclear issue. In signaling an end to the moratorium, perhaps Kim is articulating a ‘last, best chance’ for the Biden administration to take action before the situation escalates,” she said.

“However, I don’t think this means Kim will follow through right away. In making this announcement, he’s allowing both the U.S. and himself time to gauge and respond,” she said.

The North Korean regime is “doing the only thing it knows how to do,” David Maxwell of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told RFA.

“Kim Jong-un is executing a political warfare strategy against the ROK, the U.S. and the international community. It is also preparing its warfighting campaign to be able to attack South Korea. These two lines of effort are not mutually exclusive, they are in fact mutually supporting and reinforcing,” Maxwell said.

“The more capability military systems the regime possesses, the more likely it can negotiate from a position of strength. And these actions and negotiations can contribute to driving a wedge in the ROK/US alliance to try to achieve one of the regime’s key objectives: to drive U.S. forces from the peninsula,” he said.

The question about whether Kim Jong Un would remove the moratorium depends on several factors, including the Biden administration’s approach to denuclearization and the results of the upcoming South Korean election, Ken Gause of the Virginia-based CNA think tank told RFA.

“Kim Jong Un has to make an assessment about the Biden administration… The Biden administration is a very conventional administration and it’s not likely to engage with North Korea the way the Trump administration did. And so, therefore, the possibility of getting sanctions relief is probably not very high,” Gause said.

“The only thing that kind of stands in the way of North Korea pushing off the moratorium is the fact that you still have a progressive administration in Seoul. … So, the question becomes not if they’re going to get rid of the moratorium, but when are they going to get rid of the moratorium if the current situation stays,” Gause said.

North Korea must also consider its relationship with China if it decides to lift the moratorium, the Atlantic Council’s Robert Manning told RFA.

“I think that part of the reason for that they kept their moratoriums since 2018 is probably pressure from China that didn’t want to see a new crisis between North Korea and the U.S.,” Manning said.

“I think anything that they do [that disrupts] the Olympics would be seriously frowned upon by Beijing,” he said.

The White House, the U.S. mission to the U.N., and the EU delegation to the U.N. reiterated to RFA that they preferred a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue, and voiced support for existing U.S. and U.N. sanctions.

Meanwhile, the South Korean National Intelligence Service on Friday said that North Korea is considering various means, including test-firing ICBMs, to pressure the United States. 

Analysts in South Korea said that China could potentially use North Korea as a tool to keep the U.S. in check, meaning that Beijing would prefer the status quo.

“Isn’t North Korea’s value increasing as China’s countermeasure against the U.S.?” said Park Young-ho, director of the Peace Research Institute Seoul.

“It seems that China’s position is that it would be better for the parties involved in the Korean Peninsula to manage and maintain the situation rather than getting angry with North Korea,” he said.

Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.