Xayaburi Dam Constructors Defy Moratorium

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By ASIA SENTINEL| July 2, 2012 |

A Mekong Giant Catfish was caught by local residents on the Mekong River near the point where the Xayaburi proposed dam will be built. (PHOTO: http://www.camboguide.com)

Despite the opposition of three governments and an array of environmentalists and public service groups from across the planet, the Xayaburi Dam, deep inside the mountains of northern Laos on the lower Mekong River, appears to be almost unstoppable.

The Thai energy company Ch. Karnchang is said to be pressing ahead with the dam, to be built to supply electricity to the Energy Generating Authority of Thailand despite the fact that the Mekong River Commission, comprising water and environmental ministers from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam agreed to a ban on further construction in December while a more comprehensive environmental study of the dam is completed.

However, according to the Berkeley, California- based environmental organization International Rivers, their investigation of the site reveals work is still moving forward. Significant resettlement of villagers in the area has already been undertaken, International Rivers said, despite promises by the energy company that it would comply with the Laotian government’s commitment to postpone construction until there is regional agreement.

The Mekong, which supports the largest freshwater fishery in the world, is being increasingly imperiled by plans for a long series of big dams. The downstream governments are concerned that the Xayaburi and 10 other structures planned for the Mekong, which originates in China and flows through Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, will wreck the fishery and imperil the lives of those who live below it. The river’s silt deposits provide rich soil nutrients for rice and other crops. It feeds a river basin populated by 60 million people. Environmentalists say anywhere between 23 and 100 fish species could be adversely affected.

Ch. Karnchang, however, appears to have signed an agreement a month ago to move ahead on the project despite the objections of the Mekong River Commission, according to media in Thailand, despite the fact that Virapong Viravong, the Laotian Vice Minister for Energy and Mines, said the dam may have to be redesigned to avoid any adverse impact on the environment.

The Chiang Rai-based Lower Mekong People’s Network, a group of riparian communities opposed to the construction from seven different provinces in Thailand along the Mekong, said they would launch a lawsuit on July 9 against the construction after collecting signatures from hundreds of people who say they will be negatively affected by the construction. The organization has been holding a series of rallies and protest meetings in the villages that are expected to be adversely affected by both the construction and the dam itself.

The lawsuit alleges the Thai government forged an agreement with Laos to buy electricity generated by the US $3.8 billion dam upon completion, without disclosing the details of the agreement to the public as required by Thai law. The 1,260-megawatt dam would provide 95 percent of its electricity to Thailand.

A Thai villager who spoke to Radio Free Asia on condition of anonymity, said that Lao officials had a duty to explain the cross-border ramifications of the massive dam.

“If Lao officials state that the riparian Thais have no reason to protest the dam, that is inappropriate because the Lao authorities haven’t explained to us villagers about the possible cross-border impacts,” the villager said. “When those impacts occur, who will be responsible? Studies show that the dam will have negative impacts on people downstream, especially people in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.”

“International Rivers found construction activities underway during a visit last week to the dam site and 15 affected villages,” said Ame Trandem, the Southeast Asia Program Director for International Rivers.

“Recent activities include dredging to deepen and widen the riverbed at the dam site, the construction of a large concrete retaining wall, and an increase in the company’s local labor force. One village, Houay Souy, was already resettled from the dam’s planned spillway to near Xayaboury town in January 2012.”

Ch Karnchang, Trandem said, “has blatantly defied the diplomatic process underway to decide on the future of the Mekong River. The company has violated the trust of the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, with apparent impunity.”

She charged that Aswin Kongsiri, the Ch. Karnchang Board of Directors chairman, had told newspapers the company would to wait for all stakeholders in the Greater Mekong Subregion to agree before going ahead, and that the company had not yet started construction.

“We have thus focused on project preparation, mainly financing and the environmental impact report.” Aswin told the Bangkok Post. These claims came weeks after the Lao government publicly announced that dam construction had been postponed and only “preliminary construction” such as building access roads had taken place.

“The definition of ‘preliminary’ keeps expanding,” said Kirk Herbertson, Mekong Campaigner for International Rivers,” in a prepared news release. “Ripping up the riverbed and resettling entire villages cannot be considered a preliminary activity.”

International Rivers interviewed resettled families from the village Houay Souy in the path of the dam and, the organization said, found a series of broken promises. The resettled families have yet to receive new agricultural land and have been required to spend much of their own compensation money to finish building the houses that were provided to them.

Ch. Karnchang also reneged on a promise to provide one year of free electricity and water, the organization said. “Instead villagers were provided only one month free. The company has informed other villages that they will be moved as soon as December 2012, but said they will not compensate the villagers for the loss of fisheries, access to agricultural land, gold panning, and other major sources of food and income, in violation of Lao law.”

Teerapong Pomun, Director of Thai NGO Living River Siam, who joined the trip to the dam site, said, “Even at this early stage, the Xayaburi Dam is causing harm to local people and the environment. Ch. Karnchang needs to be held accountable for its irresponsible and illegal behavior. It’s only a matter of time before the damage to the river’s ecosystem and fisheries begins to impact downstream countries like Thailand, something the company has failed to even take into account.”

Coffee colonialism in Laos

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By Beaumont Smith

VIENTIANE – It is an increasingly familiar tale in Laos: poor farmers are pushed off their ancestral lands by corrupt local officials to make way for capital-rich, foreign-invested plantation agriculture.

But the tenacity of one small group of agrarians who are fighting back has revealed the abuse of power that attends many Lao land dealings, representing a landmark case in the country’s often opaque and obscure authoritarian politics.

In a classic David versus Goliath struggle, farmers in Paksong, southern Laos find themselves pitted against Singaporean coffee company Outspan Boloven, a subsidiary of agribusiness giant Olam International. The company won a government concession to plant coffee on what the protesting agrarians claim were illegally seized lands.

The farmers have staged rare protests in communist-run Laos, bringing national attention to their grass roots plight and perceived high level corruption in the land deal. Puan, a thin, angular-faced man involved in the fight, said during a recent trip to the national capital to air grievances, “We will die for our land.”

A Vientiane-based Lao lawyer, who declined to be named because he is providing informal legal advice to the group, agrees that violence is often the only recourse for farmers victimized by state-backed land-grabbing. “Maybe some have to die so that the world takes notice of what is happening in this country – the misuse of power, the suppression of protest,” he said.

A delegation of the aggrieved farmers first came to Vientiane in late February and by several accounts were heavily harassed by officials, forcing them to move between safe houses. An interview on national radio with the group’s members is believed to have triggered one popular call-in program’s cancellation (see Off the air in Laos, Asia Times Online, February 22, ’12).

Apart from protests, the group has twice pleaded for intervention with the legal department of Laos’ National Assembly, each time presenting detailed dossiers of their claims to the land to the Petitions Office. Both times officials’ have made empty promises to investigate the situation, they claim.

The Vientiane-based Land Issues Working Group (LIWG), a nongovernmental organization that has supported the case, is known to have mediated with Outspan Boloven representatives and on behalf of the group approached the local Singapore Embassy.

Those efforts, however, have so far failed to cool grass roots passions. “We don’t want an agreement; we want our land back. They [company representatives] came to the area last week but no one talked to us. They should leave,” Puan insisted, the rest of his group nodding in agreement.

Profitable brew
Lao coffee, like Lao beer, is now internationally renowned.

The organic coffee grown by smallholder farmers on the Boloven Plateau commands premium prices in global markets, and has fueled a surge of trendy coffee shops in Lao cities. The rich volcanic soils and conducive climate of the country’s southern plateau has recently attracted foreign investors to the organic growing region.

In 2010, Sonexay Siphandone, Governor of Champasak province and former Communist Party Secretary, granted Outspan Boloven the use of 150 hectares of prime agricultural land on a 30 year concession basis. Siphandone hails from one of the country’s most powerful political families, with known commercial interests spanning hydropower, hotels and land holdings.

The concession represented the maximum amount of land that could be legally granted by a provincial authority; larger concession land areas require national level approval.

LIWG noted in a report that under such concessions companies often start clearing land after receiving the maximum plots allowed by the provincial government while their request for more land is pending in Vientiane. In the case of Outspan Boloven, LIWG notes, the clearing had been ongoing while national approval was still pending.

Over the protests of local farmers, the company expanded its original 150-hectare plantation to more than 1,100 hectares, impinging on over 140 hectares of productive village lands, burning high value trees such as rosewoods and teak, and desecrating graveyards and ancestral shrines in the clearing process, according to aggrieved farmers.

Already 1,460 hectares have been planted with coffee, and the company has announced plans to expand its holdings to 3,000 hectares.

“Companies often destroy graveyards and shrines to eradicate claims of ancestral ownership and demoralize communities,” said Scotland-based filmmaker Serge Marti, drawing parallels between what is happening now in Laos to palm oil development in Indonesia.

Video shot in the contested area in Paksong a week before the delegation arrived in Vientiane showed piles of burnt and smoking timber and bamboo clumps. Bare earth exposed by company bulldozers is ringed by openly distraught villagers.

“Outspan gave the villagers 20 tons of rice three years ago. That was for over 1,000 people. But in the long run how can the families of Nong Mek, Nong Tua Nong Hin and Nong Tiem [villages] live?” asked the filmmaker who declined to be named for reasons of security. “We will have to send emergency food aid down to the families that are starving.”

Puan, an unofficial delegation leader, opened a red ledger that accounts for the local losses incurred by the Outspan Boloven plantation: 205 hectares of productive forest, 10 hectares of encroached housing land, 71 hectares of watershed forest and 14 hectares of specialty incense bark trees felled to make way for the Singaporean company’s coffee trees.

His accounting shows that some 52 families have lost all of their land and income sources, including the uprooting of their own coffee trees. None of the affected families were compensated for the land or their loss of livelihoods, nor were any formal agreements or contracts signed with village leaders, he says.

Soon after the agreement with the governor’s office came into force, Outspan Boloven brought in tractors and leveled the ground without any local consultations. “They worked day and night. The noise and light did not allow us to sleep,” Puan grumbled. “We went out and tried to stop them, but they told us we had no rights anymore as the land had been granted by the governor.”

Soumpheng, a village head in the area settled by the ethnic Nya Hitun/Yahern minority, takes issue with that interpretation. He says attempts to get an explanation from the local district and provincial offices were met variously with obfuscation, lies and threats.

“The land was granted to us by the (former) Royal Lao Government in 1901…The French colonials brought coffee in 1954 [and] later we fought to make them leave our land, just like we fought against the Americans. So we are veterans of fighting and are unafraid,” he said.

“After the socialist government forbade shifting cultivation, we had no trouble diversifying. We planted lots of commercial trees and other subsistence crops. The money we got enabled us to pay our land tax. We have been awarded certificates of appreciation because we always paid our taxes on time,” he added.

LIWG’s analysis supports the basis of these complaints. “Clearance of crops appears to have taken place before permission was given by village leaders in regard of private and crop-cultivated communal land, although the survey report said that Outspan [Boloven] should obtain permission from village leaders first before clearing.”

Damage control
Olam International, an integrated agricultural produce supply company, is among Singapore’s top 40 largest companies, with a multinational presence in 65 countries worldwide.

The company claims to be among the world’s largest suppliers of coffee, sesame, cocoa, rice, spices, peanuts, cotton and tropical hardwood products, supplying over 11,000 different customers. Coffee from the first harvested Outspan Boloven crop has already been exported to California, according to the company.

The company’s local office could not be reached for comment, but its central office in Singapore responded to queries about the controversy through Gong Communications, a London-based public relations company.

Sara Firouzyar, a Gong Communications representative, said Olam International was concerned about the local protests against the plantation. “We believed in good faith that we had followed national laws and relevant processes,” she said.

Firouzyar said the company first learned about the protests from LIWG, rather than the subsidiary’s representatives, and that an independent three-person team – comprised of one Lao and two Dutch nationals – had since been engaged to investigate and perform an audit on the situation.

Firouzyar said that Olam also promised to hold 12 stakeholder meetings, which, if they happen, mused long-time Lao resident Richard Hollis, in an email, “may cast unwanted light on government corruption and ineptitude.”

At the same time, she maintained that the project was consistent with “Olam’s Livelihood Charter”, which states the company aims “to bring prosperity to our farming and rural communities. We build long-term relationships based on fairness and trust. We seek to transfer skills and knowledge through partnerships.”

Olam International declined to respond to how the company would meet the demands of protesting farmers who are fighting for a return of their seized ancestral lands.

“We are also actively recruiting a qualified, local community specialist to be based in Laos to ensure that we are able to build strong local relationships going forward,” said Firouzyar. At the time of this writing, the composition of those committees was still being negotiated.

Some hope that Olam International’s apparent willingness to negotiate might provide Lao civil society with a much needed fillip, as well as provide a lightning rod for land rights reform. Laos ranks 158th out of 180 countries surveyed on Transparency International’s global corruption perception index, a ranking influenced by a recent surge in official land grabbing.

Although not reported in the state-controlled press, land grabbing is fueling rising rural unrest across the country, according to NGOs monitoring the situation. They feel that Governor Siphandone’s role in granting the controversial Outspan Boloven concession, as well as similar land concessions he has given in the area to Vietnamese agribusiness investors, should be opened to public scrutiny.

Farmers like Puan, however, have lost all faith in official channels for transparency and justice. “This is our dignity and our lives” he said. “We are not afraid to die.”

Beaumont Smith is a freelance journalist.

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