Study damns Mekong dams

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/NH30Ae02.html

Study damns Mekong dams
By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK – Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega-dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.

At least 1,780 known freshwater fish species have been identified in the “Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot’, which includes the Mekong and parts of the Chao Phraya River that flows through Thailand, revealed the 158-page report released last week by the IUCN, ahead of its world congress to be held in Jeju, South Korea from September 6-15.

IUCN, which is based in Switzerland and is the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, assists societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and biodiversity of nature and to ensure that the use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.

“The Mekong ranks third (after the Amazon and Congo) or second in the world in terms of diversity of river fish, depending on whether the verified species total or the higher estimate is accepted,” notes the IUCN study, “The Status and Distribution of Freshwater Biodiversity in Indo-Burma”.

The study has strengthened a growing anti-dam movement that has united campaigners from several countries in the region that are likely to be affected by the 1,260-megawatt hydropower project being built at a cost US$3.8 billion.

“This is an unprecedented scientific contribution for us to know what is in the river between [the Laotian cities of] Luang Prabang and Vientiane,” Robert Mather, head of IUCN Southeast Asia, told IPS. “It shows how little we understand the river or the impact of the planned dam.”

The report will feed discussions about dams like the Xayaburi at the IUCN gathering at Jeju, which is expected to include more than 1,200 government and non-government organisations (NGOs) from 160 countries.

“This study will help to shape the real questions that need to be asked when doing EIAs [environment impact assessments] before building the dam,” Mather said.

Thai communities rallying against the Xayaburi dam this month lodged a petition against the energy ministry and the state-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) in the country’s administrative courts, charging these bodies with failure to inform the public about the environmental and social impacts of the dam.

Even so, Norkun Sitthiphong, permanent secretary in Thailand’s energy ministry, announced on August 24 that construction work for the Xayaburi dam was on track and that electricity production was scheduled to begin by 2019.

“The Xayaburi power plant plays a crucial role in Thailand’s power development,” the Thai official said, affirming the close link Thailand has as a major investor of this dam, the first of a cascade of 11 dams being planned to harness the lower waters of Southeast Asia’s largest river.

Earlier studies by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-government agency, estimate that the proposed dams could result in agricultural losses worth more than $500 million annually and reduce dietary fish intake of Thai and Lao people by 30%.

It could also result in the creation of reservoirs along the Mekong, studies by the MRC, in which Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members and Myanmar (or Burma) and China are dialogue partners.

The MRC is yet to clear construction for the dam and announced in December that it would approach international development partners to study the dam’s implications before doing so.

Activists believe that it is not too late to stop the Xayaburi dam especially because of a growing movement against it.

“This is the first time local communities have gone to the Thai courts to stop a cross-border hydropower project,” said Premrudee Daoroung, co-director of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, a Bangkok-based green lobby.

“They are turning to a clause in the Thai constitution that requires government agencies to conduct public hearings on projects like the Xayaburi dam, which will impact Thai communities and Thailand’s biodiversity,” she told IPS.

“Their biggest concern is that the dam will devastate fishing in the Mekong, which has been their main livelihood for generations. Their campaign began out of fear that the Xayaburi dam will affect the annual fish migration in the Mekong.”

Loss of biodiversity is another concern. “The currency for measuring fish biodiversity is species, not kilograms, dollars or catch per unit of effort,” the IUCN report said.

Grassroots communities in Cambodia and Vietnam have expressed similar concerns in their “Save the Mekong” campaign.
The Xayaburi dam could, they say, threaten the livelihoods of some 60 million people living in the lower Mekong, who harvest an estimated $2.2 billion to $3.9 billion worth of fish annually – or about a quarter of the world’s annual inland-water catch.

Besides food security, this campaign, which has been endorsed by nearly 60,000 people, has also forged other bonds.

“The outcry has been strong because of the centrality of the river to millions of people, as well as to the region’s history and cultural identity,” said Carl Middleton, a Mekong River expert who lectures at the International Development Studies Programme at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

“Just as the river is shared between the countries, so the proposed Xayaburi dam has brought many people together in opposition to the project,” he told IPS. “The size of the public response opposed to the Xayaburi dam is unprecedented for a hydropower project in the region.”

The protests have produced a mixed response from Laos, one of the poorest of the six countries that shares the Mekong, a 4,880 km-long river that flows through southern China, touching Myanmar and Thailand, and through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Laos has set its sights on becoming the battery to the region by tapping its rivers through large hydropower projects and selling the energy generated to its neighbors, such as Thailand. The foreign exchange, Vientiane argues, can help one-third of the country’s 5.8 million population living in poverty.

Laos has assured neighbors, Western donors and an intergovernmental river development body that it would not proceed with the controversial dam till the cross-border environmental and social impacts have been assessed. In July, Vientiane even announced suspension of the project.

Ch Karnchang Plc (CK), one of Thailand’s largest infrastructure builders and owner of 50% of the shares of Xayaburi Power, the controversial dam’s developer, suggests otherwise.

In mid-August, CK’s chief executive, Plew Trivisvavet, confirmed that the dam developer had not skipped a beat in its construction plans. “We’re still working on the project, as no one has told us to stop,” he told journalists.

(Inter Press Service)

Damming the future? Livelihoods at stake on Mekong River

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/damming-future-livelihoods-stake-mekong-river

Samantha Page | GlobalPost.com | Jul 25, 2012

Construction at the Xayaburi Dam site in July 2012.
(Samantha Page/GlobalPost)

NONGKHAI PROVINCE, Thailand and XAYABURI PROVINCE, Laos — Although his family has lived for generations beside the Mekong River, Itthapon Kamsuk thinks he might soon have to move.

During the dry season, from March to May, Kamsuk’s village in Nongkhai province in northeastern Thailand routinely runs short of water, and big fish are growing scarcer.

“The water level is already unpredictable, because of the dams in China,” the 45-year-old said. “Before dam construction, we lived peacefully. We could have fish all the time.”

Now, another hydroelectric dam is being built on the Mekong in a deal between the Lao government and a Thai construction company, despite an international agreement to protect water rights along the river and promises by Thai and Lao leaders to pause the project for further study.

The 1,260-megawatt Xayaburi is the first of 11 proposed mainstream dams that will affect agriculture, fishing and cultural heritage from its location about 100 miles upstream from Kamsuk’s village in northeast Thailand, through Cambodia to the Mekong River delta in Vietnam — the fertile heart of the world’s second largest rice exporter.

The dam will directly affect more than 202,000 people along the river, estimates International Rivers, a US-based NGO, including fishermen and farmers. Dams disrupt water flow, killing fish habitats and disrupting migratory breeding patterns. They also disrupt sediment flow, which provides nutrients for crops downstream.

More from GlobalPost: In Laos, a tale of two dams [VIDEO]

The Thai construction company, Ch. Karnchang, expects a 12-13 percent annual gross return on a $2.4 billion investment over its 29-year concession from the Lao government. The government, which will own the dam, also stands to profit handsomely by selling the electricity Xayaburi produces — largely to Thailand.

But the environmental and human costs of the project may far outweigh revenues that Laos, one of Asia’s poorest countries, expects to reap from its dams.

The only wide-ranging report on the project, a cost-benefit analysis from Portland State University, estimated that when loss of livelihood was considered, the development went from a $33 billion revenue source to negative $274 billion liability.

Sparse Living

Livelihoods along the river in Laos and Thailand consist mainly of fishing and agriculture, with some panning for gold.

“My mother has a piece of land she farms for self-consumption. If there is any extra, we sell it,” Kamsuk said. He owns a small food shop.

In 2009, the average salary in the northeastern provinces of Thailand was 118,200 baht (US$3,735) per year, according to DBS Bank. The region has the lowest per capita GDP in Thailand — about one-seventh that of metropolitan Bangkok.

The area around the dam site itself, northwest of Vientiane and due east of Chiang Mai in Thailand, is sparsely populated. Villages of a couple hundred people sit half-shrouded from river view by the jungle.

Every few kilometers, a solitary fisherman clings to the rocky bank, methodically dipping a net attached to two long bamboo poles into the current.

Some 2,100 of these Laos will be resettled away from the site.

Villagers still in their homes say they expect to move next year, but two villages were relocated in January. The new houses already have termites, and photos from the resettlement show gaps between boards that were nailed down still wet.

More from GlobalPost: Environmental concerns halt Lao dam

The resettlement area has little agricultural land, no river access, and no forests for foraging, said Teerapong Pomun, director of Living River Siam, one of the groups bringing the lawsuit.

“The are mostly fishing and agricultural people. They had a better life in the village,” he said. “They have only 0.75 hectares, and it is too late to plant for the growing season. They just sit at home.”

According to International Rivers’ Ame Trandem, relocated villagers were promised compensation, but that deal has already gone awry.

“They were told they would be compensated for everything, now it is just teak and fruit trees,” she said.

Downstream, Kamsuk is unlikely to get any compensation, so earlier this month he made the journey from Nongkhai to Bangkok, about 10 hours by bus, for a meeting with the Network of Thai People in Eight Mekong Provinces, a coalition of civil groups fighting the dam’s construction.

Next month the coalition will file a lawsuit against the Energy Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), which agreed to purchase 95 percent of the dam’s projected 7,200 gigawatt hours per year.

The network alleges that EGAT failed to adequately notify the public or get public comment before signing the deal with Ch. Karnchang in October. The suit points out that no environmental review for the impact on Thailand has been done.

“None of Thailand’s agencies have made any move to prevent the impacts,” said Sor Rattanamanee Polkla, the lead attorney for the suit.

The World Wildlife Fund says a study on a similar project on a Mekong tributary in Thailand, found that 85 percent of fish species were affected, with 56 species “disappearing entirely” and “reduced catches” for another 169 species. The WWF predicts the dam would spell extinction for the Mekong giant catfish.

The change in water fluctuations from the dams in China has already damaged the fish population in the Mekong itself. Most of the big fish are gone, Kamsuk said, explaining why he has joined with a group of civic organizations to bring a lawsuit against the Thai state agency that agreed to purchase most of the dam’s energy.

Uneasy Neighbors

In 1995, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia signed an agreement pledging “to cooperate in all fields of sustainable development, utilization, management and conservation of the water and related resources of the Mekong River Basin.”

Under this framework, Laos has entered a consultation process with its neighboring countries over the Xayaburi Dam, but the agreement is somewhat less than binding.

“Laos is not seeking legal approval,” said Surasak Glahan, a spokesman for the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission, which estimates that 450,000 people will be affected. “The Mekong Agreement says the countries should reach consensus, but it doesn’t say a country cannot go forward.”

In a visit to the region earlier this month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Laos to adhere to spirit of the agreement and to further study the dam’s impact.

“The Mekong River Basin is one of the world’s most productive ecosystems. It’s really a miracle of the way it operates in this region. Millions — tens, hundreds of millions of people — depend directly or indirectly on it for their livelihoods,” Clinton said. “Some studies have explored the benefits of generating electricity, but questions — serious questions — remain about the effects on fisheries, agriculture, livelihoods, environment and health.”

Cambodia has already sent a letter to its northern neighbor, asking that construction be halted, and Vietnam suggested postponing the plan for a decade, while additional environmental studies were carried out.

In the face of this outcry, Ch. Karnchang has publicly said it is only doing preliminary work, but a visit to the dam site in early July showed a flurry of activity — not only on access roads and offices, but also on a flattened piece of land jutting into the river and on the hillside adjacent to the dam site.

Executives at EGAT and Ch. Karnchang did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The dam is creating tension between the Southeast Asian nations, Living River Siam’s Pomun said.

“You can see that people are already pointing to the Laos government,” Pomun added. “If the problem happens in Laos, it will become a big issue for the ASEAN community. Right now, even though they haven’t completed the project, Ch. Karnchang has made a lot of money by selling stocks.”

The Mekong river: Lies, dams and statistics

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/07/mekong-river

Jul 26th 2012, 8:55 by T.F. | XAYABURI and VIENTIANE

A DENSE cloud of diplomatic doublespeak hangs over the turbid waters of the Mekong. An amazing week of conflicting statements, stark contradictions and confusion has made everything about the site of a controversial dam project at Xayaburi, in northern Laos, as clear as mud.

The Mekong, which courses through the very heart of inland South-East Asia, is home to the world’s largest freshwater fisheries, about 800 different native species. Its rich biodiversity is second only to the Amazon’s. Through fishing, aquaculture and irrigation, it sustains 65m people.

Since September 2010 there has been an ongoing consultation process among the four riparian countries party to the Mekong River Commission (MRC)—Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand—about whether the Xayaburi project should be approved or blocked. The dam would be the first of its kind. The government of Laos has repeatedly claimed it would heed the strong objections lodged by Cambodia and Vietnam, who fear that the dam’s side effects could decimate fisheries and reduce the flow of sediment needed by farmlands downriver.

There was a current of déjà vu swirling around Phnom Penh this month. On July 13th, at an annual summit for the foreign ministers of ASEAN, the envoy from Laos made a familiar declaration: that work on the Xayaburi dam has been suspended, pending further studies. Reuters, understandably, took this to be an official statement of fact from the Laotian government.

Only three days later Viraphonh Viravong, a deputy minister of energy, contradicted the foreign minister’s statement. A tour of the site, sponsored by the government of Laos, served to rubbish the foreign minister’s statement at ASEAN. As Mr Viraphonh made clear to a party of invited visitors, including MRC officials, diplomats and a few technical experts on fisheries, groundwork is going ahead after all, without any waiting for a further assessment of the project’s impact on the river.

In the MRC’s judgment, “the project is in an advanced preparation stage with…exploratory excavation in and around the river completed.” International Rivers, an NGO, made their own unofficial investigation of the site in June, observing that the river had already been dredged and widened. This despite the fact that in December 2011 the four member-states of the MRC had agreed on the need for further study of the dam’s prospective effects on the environment. The understanding was that no dam would be built until the study was completed.

Failure to halt the dam at Xayaburi would deal an enormous blow to the credibility of the MRC. Its authority depends on the possibility of enforcing co-operation between its members. Moreover the dam’s construction could trigger a major diplomatic rift between the four states themselves.

The initial stages of its construction are visibly under way. So has Laos decided to renege on its international commitments?

This is where things get murky. Mr Viraphonh claims that what observers witnessed was only “preparatory work”. He says the actual construction of the dam has not begun, nor has the river been blocked.

But fisheries experts say that long before the river is fully blocked, existing construction will disturb the riverbed enough to affect fish populations significantly. And even while the river flows, construction work will change the downstream flow of sediments.

The Laotian government has appointed two foreign consultants to help make its case. Pöyry Energy, based in Switzerland, and the French Compagnie Nationale du Rhône are trying to convince Cambodia, Vietnam and other sceptics that the Xayaburi dam will be benign.

Both firms argue that “fish passes” or weirs can be built to enable 85% of the river’s fish to get past the dam’s turbines. According to their plan, the fish could swim happily up or down the Mekong. But this claim has never been put into practice. Eric Baran of the World Fish Centre in Phnom Penh joined last week’s trip to the dam site. He observed that “there has never been a successful fish pass built for a dam the size of Xayaburi, anywhere in the tropics.”

Pöyry Energy’s previous report, a compliance review of the Xayaburi dam in 2011, was widely faulted. More recently, the firm’s parent company has been blacklisted by the World Bank for an unrelated charge of corruption and its CEO has resigned.

Laos might nonetheless esteem the views of its Western consultants. But it heard very different advice from America’s sectary of state, when she made her recent visit to the region. “I’ll be very honest with you. We made a lot of mistakes,” Hilary Clinton said in her opening remarks to the ASEAN summit. She was talking about dams built in the United States. “We’ve learned some hard lessons about what happens when you make certain infrastructure decisions and I think that we all can contribute to helping the nations of the Mekong region avoid the mistakes that we and others made.”

America has its own concerns too. It might worry that if the Xayaburi project goes ahead, China is set to build at least three more dams further down the Mekong, bringing its commercial interests ever deeper into the sub-region.

Cambodia’s minister for water resources, Lim Kean Hor, recently send a letter of protest to the Laotian government calling on them to “halt all preliminary construction and respect the Mekong spirit of friendship and international co-operation.”

The Mekong delta is Vietnam’s rice-bowl. The government has been arguing all along for a ten-year moratorium on dam construction on the river, basing its case on an assessment commissioned by the MRC and finished in 2010. Vietnamese scientists have warned that dams upstream would lead to devastating losses of fisheries and rice productivity and to the salinisation of cropland.

And finally NGOs representing people from the eight provinces in north-east Thailand are about to file legal action in the their country’s courts. They mean to force their national government to review the contract that the state electricity body signed, which obliges it to buy 95% of all the power from the Xayaburi dam.

Thailand’s government has already endorsed the position that Xayaburi dam should be put on hold pending further studies, though it has done so relatively quietly. If Vietnam’s and Cambodia’s conflict with Laos escalates, Thailand’s role will become critical.

The dam is financed by the four major Thai banks. The dam-builder is a Bangkok-based corporation, Ch. Karnchang. The north-eastern Thais’ campaign is aimed at persuading Thailand’s government to stop the project by blocking the banks’ loans. Such indirect tactics might be the only way left to save the MRC—and to preserve some semblance of international co-operation along the Mekong.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

How the Next 12 Months of Xayaburi Dam Construction Will Affect the Mekong River

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.internationalrivers.org/blogs/267/how-the-next-12-months-of-xayaburi-dam-construction-will-affect-the-mekong-river

Thu, 07/26/2012 – 4:30am

By: Kirk Herbertson

The Xayaburi Dam site in Laos is abuzz with activity these days. Thousands of laborers and dozens of construction vehicles work around the clock to finish the dam on schedule by 2019. Access roads, worker camps, and transmission lines have been built. Villages are being resettled. The river has already been widened at one point, and a dike cuts into the river at another point. One of the project’s lead engineers, the Pöyry Group, told a delegation of visiting diplomats last week that the coffer dam—which diverts the river while the permanent dam is built—will be completed by next May. Soon after that, the dam itself will begin to appear.

Laos’ rapid progress on the dam worries its neighbors. The Mekong River is a shared resource, and what happens upstream in Laos can affect people downstream in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. According to the 1995 treaty that governs use of the Mekong River, the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam must jointly decide if the Xayaburi Dam will go forward. No decision has yet been reached. Cambodia and Vietnam have both requested that transboundary impact studies be completed before a decision is made, but Laos has said it will not conduct these studies. A regional diplomatic crisis may soon erupt.

Construction hasn’t started?

Proceeding with construction at this early stage would be a clear violation of the 1995 Mekong Agreement and international law. Not to worry, Laos spokesperson Viraphonh Viravong told the Bangkok Post last week. “We have not started working on any construction on the Mekong River that is permanent.”

Yet the 1995 Mekong Agreement makes no distinction between “permanent” and “temporary” construction activities along the river. It worries instead about any activities that will cause “harmful effects” to the river’s ecosystems. Similarly, international law (the rules that govern how states treat one another) kicks in when the harmful effects are likely to be transboundary, as they are in this case.

As it turns out, many of the construction activities already underway at the dam site are likely to have harmful effects on the Mekong River.

Yes, construction affects the river

As the Mekong River Commission noted in its 2011 technical review of the proposed Xayaburi Dam, “impacts during the construction phase are equally as important as those during dam operation.” (p. 32) Based on experiences with other dams, here are just a few of the impacts we might see in the next 12 months if construction continues:

• The coffer dam and other structures will divert the river, which could prevent fish from migrating past the dam site and block sediment flows downstream.
• As extra sediment becomes loosened during construction and mixes into the water, it could change water quality, habitats, and the ability of fish to breathe. This could lead to declining fish populations.
• Loosened sediment could bury and harm fish eggs.
• Pollution from the construction site could affect water quality and alter ecosystems, harming fisheries and agriculture downstream.
• Disturbances to the river could affect plankton and microorganisms that are important to the stability of the river’s ecosystem.
• Resettlement of local communities could create food security problems, based on experiences in the first resettled village.

What happens in Laos in the next 12 months will not just be localized. The construction phase is likely to have significant impacts that can be felt downstream in neighboring countries.

Pöyry, CNR, and the art of making scientific-sounding promises

Yet we still do not know the full extent of the harm that the Xayaburi Dam’s construction phase will cause. Laos’ consultants Pöyry Group and Compagnie Nationale du Rhône (CNR) do not know either. Despite Cambodia’s and Vietnam’s formal requests over one year ago, Laos has still not studied the baseline conditions of the river. How do fish behave in this part of the river, for example, and how do people downstream depend on these fish? It is simply not possible to understand the full extent of the dam’s impacts without first gathering this data. This is one reason why many scientists are skeptical about the unequivocal promises by Pöyry and CNR that the project will have minimal environmental impacts.

The 1995 Mekong Agreement is not perfectly written by any means, but is the best framework the region’s governments have for reaching a mutually acceptable solution. Where there are gaps, international law can provide guidance—such as the requirement to assess transboundary impacts before proceeding with any construction.

The time has come for the Mekong governments to bring Laos back into compliance with the 1995 treaty, and to return to the structure that the treaty provides. The first step, as the Cambodian government has already requested, is for all construction activities on the Xayaburi Dam to stop while further impact studies are carried out.

Ten more dams have been proposed for the Mekong River, eight of them in Laos. No one wants to repeat the chaos of Xayaburi, or to learn a few years from now that we could have prevented all of the harm that the Xayaburi Dam will soon bring.

 Kirk Herbertson

More information:

• Visit our Media Kit on the Xayaburi Dam
• Read our legal analysis of Laos’ obligations under international law
• Read our legal analysis of Laos’ obligations under the 1995 Mekong Agreement
• Comments on the Poyry report
• Comments on the CNR report

Kirk Herbertson is a lawyer and Southeast Asia Policy Coordinator for International Rivers.

Recent Posts in Blog

• How the Next 12 Months of Xayaburi Dam Construction Will Affect the Mekong River – July 26, 2012
• Testing the Waters: Laos Pushes Xayaburi Dam to Critical Point – July 19, 2012
• Ch. Karnchang Already Causing Food Insecurity Near Xayaburi Dam Site – July 11, 2012
• Scientists Warn of Catastrophe for Food Security in the Mekong – March 12, 2012
• Xayaburi Dam: What Next? – January 19, 2012

Hillary Clinton makes historic Laos visit

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/laos/9394069/Hillary-Clinton-makes-historic-Laos-visit.html

Decades after the US gave Laos a horrific distinction as the world’s most heavily bombed nation, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, has pledged to help get rid of millions of unexploded bombs that still pockmark the impoverished country.

US Secratry of State Hillary Cline greets Lao Foreign Minister Thongloun Sisoulit Photo: AFP/Getty Images

7:22AM BST 12 Jul 2012

The US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the North Vietnamese ally during its “secret war” between 1964 and 1973 – about a ton of ordnance for each Laotian man, woman and child. That exceeded the amount dropped on Germany and Japan together in World War II.

Four decades later, American weapons are still claiming lives. When the war ended, about a third of some 270 million cluster bombs dropped on Laos had failed to detonate. More than 20,000 people have been killed in Laos since then by ordnance, according to Laos’ government, and agricultural development has been stymied.

Mrs Clinton, gauging whether the nation can evolve into a new foothold of American influence in Asia, met with the prime minister and foreign minister, part of a weeklong diplomatic tour of southeast Asia. The goal is to bolster America’s standing in some of the fastest growing markets of the world, and counter China’s expanding economic, diplomatic and military dominance of the region.

Mrs Clinton said she and Laotian leaders “traced the arc of our relationship from addressing the tragic legacies of the past to finding a way to being partners of the future.”

Laos is the latest test case of the Obama administration’s efforts to “pivot” US foreign policy away from the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The efforts follow a long period of estrangement between Washington and a former Cold War-era foe, and come as US relations also warm with countries such as Burma and Vietnam.

In her meetings, Mrs Clinton discussed environmental concerns over a proposed dam on the Mekong River as well as investment opportunities and the joint efforts to clean up the unexploded bombs dropped across Laos over what was once called the Ho Chi Minh trail. Greater American support for programs in these fields will be included in a multimillion-dollar initiative for Southeast Asia to be announced later this week.

Mrs Clinton visited a Buddhist temple and a US-funded prosthetic centre for victims of American munitions. There, she met a man named Phongsavath Souliyalat, who told her how he had lost both his hands and his eyesight from a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday, four years ago.

“We have to do more,” Mrs Clinton told him. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.” Although the US bombed Laos to loosen its alliance with the North Vietnamese, the current Vietnamese government focuses its efforts in Laos on recovering its own dead, more than cleaning up unexploded bombs.

Cleanup has been excruciatingly slow. The Washington-based Legacies of War says only 1 per cent of contaminated lands have been cleared and has called on Washington to provide far greater assistance. The State Department has provided $47 million since 1997, though a larger effort could make Laos “bomb-free in our lifetimes,” California Rep. Mike Honda argued Wednesday.

“Let us mend the wounds of the past together so that Laos can begin a new legacy of peace,” he said.

The US is spending $9 million this year on cleanup operations for unexploded ordnance in Laos and is likely to offer more in the coming days.

It is part of a larger Obama administration effort to reorient the direction of US diplomacy and commercial policy as the world’s most populous continent becomes the centre of the global economy over the next century. It is also a reaction to China’s expanding influence.

The last US secretary of state to visit Laos was John Foster Dulles in 1955. His plane landed after a water buffalo was cleared from the tarmac.

At that time, the mountainous, sparsely populated nation was near the centre of US foreign policy. On leaving office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his successor, John F. Kennedy, that if Laos fell to the communists, all Southeast Asia could be lost as well.

While Vietnam ended up the focal point of America’s “domino theory” foreign policy, Laos was drawn deeply into the conflict as the U.S. helped support its anti-communist forces and bombed North Vietnamese supply lines and bases.

Landlocked and impoverished Laos offers fewer resources than its far larger neighbours and has lagged in Asia’s economic boom. It remains one of the poorest countries in Asia, even as it hopes to boost its development with accession soon to the World Trade Organisation.

In recent years, China has stepped up as Laos’ principal source of assistance, with loans and grants of up to $350 million over the past two decades. But like many others in its region, Laos’ government is wary of Beijing’s intentions. And it has kept an envious eye on neighbouring Vietnam’s 40 per cent surge in commercial trade with the United States over the past two years, as well as the sudden rapprochement between the U.S. and nearby Burma.

Persistent human rights issues stand in the way of closer relations with Washington. The US remains concerned about the plight of the ethnic Hmong minority, most of whom fled the country after fighting for a US-backed guerrilla army during the Vietnam War. Nearly 250,000 resettled in the United States. The US has pressed Laos to respect the rights of returnees from neighbouring countries.

Washington also has been seeking greater co-operation from Laos on the search for US soldiers missing in action since the Vietnam War. More than 300 Americans remain unaccounted for in Laos.

And the US is pressing the Laotian government to hold off on a proposed $3.5 billion dam project across the Mekong River. The dam would be the first across the river’s mainstream and has sparked a barrage of opposition from neighbouring countries and environmental groups, which warn that tens of millions of livelihoods could be at stake.

The project is currently on hold, and Washington hopes to stall it further with the promise of funds for new environmental studies.

Source: agencies

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• Laos accused of starting work on controversial Mekong dam  20 Apr 2011