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GMS Summit to Hear Burmese PM’s Views on Environment Management
By WILLIAM BOOT / BANGKOK
The Irrawaddy Online. 27 March 2008.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=11138
Leaders of the six nations of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS)
gather for an Asian Development Bank-backed summit in Vientiane on
March 30.
The two-day meeting of senior government representatives from China,
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma is aimed at achieving an
“integrated, harmonious and prosperous subregion” of countries through
which the Mekong River flows, says the ADB.
However, critics argue that the 60 million people whose lives are
linked in some way by the Mekong have little or no say in what is
happening to their river and the surrounding areas.
Corruption, unchecked criminality and incomprehensible government in
the GMS are damaging the environment, often in the name of economic
progress, say non-government organizations (NGOs) campaigning for
greater transparency and public involvement in economic development
issues.
Tropical timber is being illegally stripped from forests in Burma and
Laos and dams are being built or planned, either on the upper reaches
of the Mekong in China or on tributaries in Laos and Cambodia. The
developments are usually driven by Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and
sometimes Singaporean investment.
More than a dozen hydroelectric dams are planned by China along its
stretch of the 4,880 kilometer (3,030-mile) Mekong. Another four
hydroelectric systems are under construction or earmarked in Laos.
Most involve dislocation of local communities and sometimes
destruction of wildlife habitats, including several elephant herds in
Laos.
“Unmet energy demand in the region is questionable, with power
development plans often overestimating the actual domestic energy
demand,” said environment campaigners Zao Noam and Piaporn Deetes in a
report for the Thailand-based NGO, Southeast Asia Rivers Network.
“This is often a reflection of unsound economic non-transparent
decision-making.”
London-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) reported
just last week that “Vietnam’s booming economy and the West’s demand
for cheap furniture is driving rapid deforestation throughout the
Mekong River region.”
The EIA, assisted by Indonesian NGO Telapak, said the focus of this
timber trade is now Laos where criminal gangs operate in defiance of
local laws banning timber exports with “high-level corruption and
bribery” involving Thai and Singaporean buyers as well as Vietnamese.
The EIA report said it estimates that at least 500,000 cubic meters of
logs a year are being carted across the Laos-Vietnam border by
trucks.
It is against this background that government ministers and senior
officials of the ADB will assemble in Vientiane for two days of
meetings, lunches and dinners.
A major feature of the two-day meetings will be a so-called youth
forum, led by the Lao Youth Union, which is a direct offshoot of the
secretive Communist Party of Laos.
The Mekong and the dams and the plundered forests are not on the
agenda.
Among issues before the summit will be a “Road Map for Implementing
the GMS Cross-Border Power Trading.”
Burma will be represented by Prime Minister Gen Thein Sein.
The agenda lists him as addressing the “Role of Sustainable
Environmental Management in Promoting Competitiveness.” The
environment is not one of the general’s strong points, say Burma
watchers.
Another environmentalist NGO—the Bangkok-based group Toward Ecological
Recovery—warned recently that planned hydroelectric dams in the GMS
would displace up to 75,000 people and threaten hundreds of fish
species—notably the giant catfish—with extinction.
Even the official Mekong River Commission, made up of the governments
of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, has expressed anxiety about
the consequences of China’s upper Mekong activities.
“Rapid economic development coupled with increasing population
pressure is degrading the environment and the [Mekong] basin’s
resources at an increasing rate,” the commission says. “It is
imperative to do something now.”
Environmentalists and human rights groups have been making similar
warnings about hydroelectric dam plans by China and Thailand on
Burma’s major Salween and Irrawaddy rivers.
The ADB, comprising 67 member countries including the US and
Europeans, endeavors to promote development in what it reports to be
one of the world’s fastest-growing subregions.
The ADB notes the GMS have an average annual economic expansion rate
of over 6 percent “in spite of a number of adverse internal and
external shocks.”
“The ADB no doubt means well, but half the members of the GMS club are
gangster economies in which ordinary people—those the ADB wants to help
—have absolutely no say in what goes on,” said an official with a
Western embassy in Bangkok monitoring regional developments who spoke
on condition of anonymity.
“You could describe the GMS group as four dictatorships, one UN
dependency [referring to Cambodia] and one sort of democracy
[Thailand].” |
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