REUTERS
January 14, 2019 at 11:00 JST
The Mekong River (Asahi Shimbun file
photo)
MO CAY, Vietnam-- In the dead of
night, the entire front half of shopkeeper Ta Thi Kim Anh's house collapsed.
Perched on the sandy banks of the Mekong River, it took just a few minutes for
one half of everything she owned to plunge into its murky depths.
"Our kitchen, our laundry room,
our two bedrooms, all gone," said Kim Anh, speaking amongst the twisted
metal and rubble of her house, from which she still sells eggs, soap and
instant noodles to villagers in Ben Tre, a province in Vietnam's Mekong Delta
region.
"We'd be better off living in a
cave instead," said Kim Anh, who has used coconut husks and old tyres to
reinforce the riverbank under her home.
Upstream damming and extensive mining
of the Mekong's riverbed for sand is causing the land between the sprawling
network of rivers and channels near the mouth of one of the world's great
rivers to sink at a pace of around 2 cm (0.75 inches) a year, experts and
officials said.
The 4,350 km (2,700-mile) river,
known as the Lancang in its upper reaches, flows from China's Tibetan Plateau
along the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, through Cambodia and finally
Vietnam, where it forms the delta known in Vietnam as the "Nine
Dragons".
Reuters visited three provinces
straddling different branches of the delta, where it has supported farming and
fishing communities for millennia.
Across the region, local authorities
are struggling with a rapid pace of erosion that is destroying homes and
threatening livelihoods in the Southeast Asian country's largest rice-growing
region.
A key cause is the years of upstream
damming in Cambodia, Laos and China that has removed crucial sediment, local
officials and experts said.
That sediment, vital for checking the
mighty Mekong's currents, has also been lost due to an insatiable demand for
sand - a key ingredient in concrete and other construction materials in
fast-developing Vietnam - that has created a market both at home and abroad for
unregulated mining.
"It's not a problem of the lack
of water, it's the lack of sediment," said Duong Van Ni, an expert on the
Mekong River at the College of Natural Resources Management of Can Tho
University, the largest city in the Mekong Delta region.
"SAND NEVER REACHES US"
At this time of year the waters of
the Mekong used to flow into Vietnam as a milky-brown crawl, locals and
officials said.
Now, the river runs clear. And
without fresh sediment from upstream, the deeper riverbed creates stronger
currents, which in turn eat away at the banks of the Mekong, where those who
rely on the river for their livelihoods have their homes.
The problems began when China built
its first hydropower plants in the Upper Mekong Basin, said Ni at Can Tho
University. That left Laos, Cambodia and Thailand as the main source of
sediment for the Mekong in Vietnam, he said.
Sand mining in Cambodia boomed over
the last 10 years, fuelled in part by demand from wealthy but cramped
Singapore, where it is used to reclaim land along its coast, and culminating in
a government ban of all Cambodian sand exports in 2017 under pressure from
environmental groups.
Hydroelectric projects have
continued, however. Earlier this month, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen opened
a $816 million hydroelectric dam in Stung Treng province, near the border with
Laos, built by companies from China, Cambodia and Vietnam.
The new dam is the southeast Asian
country's biggest hydroelectric project to date and will have a catastrophic
impact on fisheries and biodiversity in the Mekong river, environmental groups
have said. Hun Sen has dismissed criticism of the project, which he says
benefits Cambodia and its people.
"Since China built hydropower
plants, new sand almost never reaches us," said Ni. "If we use up the
sand we have here, there will be no more".
China's Foreign Ministry said in response
to Reuters' questions that it "pays great attention to the concerns and
needs of downstream countries on the Mekong", adding that its regulation
of water flows from hydro dams "has already become an important instrument
in preventing floods and droughts".
Singapore's Ministry of National
Development said in a statement emailed to Reuters the city state imports sand
on a commercial basis from various countries. "We have stringent controls
to ensure that suppliers obtain sand in accordance with the source country's
laws and regulations," it said.
SLINGSHOTS AND SAND THIEVES
Regional officials in southwest
China's Yunnan province have defended the building of dams on the Mekong there
as "fully legally compliant".
Downstream, however, the problem is
made worse by thieves who illegally mine for sand, usually at night.
"The unlicensed sand miners are
very quick and devious," Nguyen Quang Thuong, vice head of Ben Tre
province's agriculture department, told Reuters in a recent interview.
"They escape very fast, so
having groups of local people helping out the authorities is very
helpful."
One such group in Ben Tre, some of
whom are as old as 67, have been using homemade weapons such as slingshots and
rudimentary catapults to drive the sand thieves away.
"We patrol 24/7, and in the
first few months we managed to get rid of 90 percent of the thieves," said
Nam Lai, one of the group. "Since 2018, none of them dare to go near our
shore".
Still, activists and environmental
groups worry that on the Mekong, which runs through six countries with
competing needs to exploit the river's hydroelectric potential, the damage has
already been done.
Pianporn Deetes, at the International
Rivers campaign group, who has worked on the Mekong for two decades, said there
was a lack of political will among the countries that share the river to
acknowledge the cross-border impact of such projects.
"Without the recognition of the
existing problems, I don't think there is any hope," she said.
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