Posted on Wednesday, November 27, 2002

RP can learn a few lessons 
from Thailand dam project

By Jose M. Galang Jr., Editor-in-Chief

(First of a series)

UBON RATCHATANI, Northeast Thailand — “Moon River used to be like a bank to us,” says Chana Kicham, a resident of one of the small communities along one of Thailand’s important rivers. “Every time we went to the river (to fish), we always went home with money.”

After the state power utility built a dam on Moon River — or the Pak Mun to the Thais — the communities along it lost their main source of livelihood. Chana, a fisherman on Kor Tai village upstream from the dam, had “no choice but to close my account.”

These days Chana buys fish from other villages, makes dried fish, then sells his product in the local public market. He says he earns about 200 baht a day from the dried fish.

That is a far cry from his earnings of 350 to 1,000 baht a day from his catch at Pak Mun — when there was still no dam that devastated the fish supply in the river.

“It was never this quiet in our village,” another resident, Sunthorn Homsin, recalls as he gazes at the nearly deserted village dotted with tamarind trees. “We often had joyous family gatherings. We held community get-togethers near the river bank.”

“Our lives changed completely since 1993 when the dam was completed and started to operate,” Sunthorn stressed before a group of visitors recently in his community which is located in the Phiboun Mangsahan district of Ubon Ratchatani province in northeast Thailand.

With incomes of 30,000 to 40,000 baht a year before the dam was built, the fisherfolk of Ubon Ratchatani were a few notches above the poverty line. And Nor­theast Thailand is considered to be the poo­rest area in the country, accounting for nearly half of all of Thailand’s poor households.

A recent World Bank report has noted that since the Asia-wide economic crisis of 1997-98, poverty has reemerged as one of Thailand’s most serious problems. After dropping to 11.6 percent in 1996 from 32.6 percent in 1988, the poverty rate has crept up to 16 percent by 2001, the World Bank estimates showed.

Among the factors cited for that was education. The World Bank said “the less-educated suffered significantly larger declines in real income per capita than the better-educated during the crisis.”

In the rural areas, farmers with small farms failed to enjoy the fruits of the economic boom in Thailand during the early and mid-1990s, and they further “lost ground” during the crisis of the late 1990s. Farmers with very small landholdings as a group are poorer today than they were at the start of the decade, the report noted.

What about the people around the Pak Mun area? Can the recent decline in their living standards be also attributed to the economic crisis?

The Pak Mun residents put the blame squarely on the dam that the state-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) built in their river. Indeed, various academic and civil society groups have over the past years given support to that thinking.

Villagers in the Pak Mun area themselves have compiled data showing the damage inflicted on the river by EGAT’s massive structure — 300 meters wide and 17 meters high, and built at a cost of about 6.5 billion baht ($260 million), with technical assistance from the Asian Development Bank and a project loan from the World Bank. The villagers’ research co­vered a period of 14 months to August this year.

Among their findings was that many of the 256 species of fish in the river have not been seen since the dam’s ope­ration in 1993. When the dam’s gates were opened temporarily last year, more than 150 species returned to what used to be their natural habitat along the Pak Mun.

The villagers’ research identified up to 22 ecosystems in the river. These were either disrupted or destroyed after the dam’s construction, the study showed.

More recently, a government-commissioned study by the Ubon Ratchatani University also noted the various degrees of despoliation in the river’s immediate surroundings. The capital of Ubon Ratchatani itself has been hit by stagnant floods du­ring the rainy season in recent years, it was noted.

The Ubon Ratchatani University’s report listed four options that the government could look at in resolving the Pak Mun Dam problem. Of these options — close the dam gates permanently, open the dam for three months in a year, open the dam five months in a year, keep the dam gates permanently open for at least five years — the team recommended keeping the gates open.

However, the government, the team members lamented, ignored their recommendation and went on to again close the dam early this month.

Tomorrow: What Pak Mun Dam is all about

Mr. Galang visited Northeast Thailand as a senior fellow under The Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship Program.

Part 2 | Part 3