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In the first summit meeting between Japan and officials from the five countries that border the banks of the 4,800-kilometer Mekong River, attendees pledged to urgently tackle the environmental issues related to development of the region. It is questionable, however, whether the meeting will produce anything more than lip service, despite the attention and funding from Japanese officials.

Tokyo pledged 200 billion yen ($2.2 billion) to the initiative, called “A Decade Toward the Green Mekong,” which will begin next year and aims to promote biodiversity and cooperation on water resource management.

In the so-called Tokyo Declaration following the summit, the five countries and Japan pledged in a remarkably vague agreement to, among other things, “build a mutually beneficial relationship based on the spirit of yu-ai , or ‘fraternity,’ which is a way of thinking that respects one’s own freedom and individual dignity while also respecting the freedom and individual dignity of others.”

To those communities whose livelihoods and survival have already been damaged by the dredging, dams and pollution currently in place, the words at the summit meeting mean very little, especially with 11 more dams planned for the river’s mainstream. The continuing degradation of the river is vital to the concerns of as many as 70 million people from its origin in the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea. More than 100 ethnic groups have adapted to the rhythms of the river over the centuries.

Those rhythms are now being seriously affected, threatening the lives of important fish populations as well as the people who live on the river’s banks. And even though villagers and fishermen complaining of the effects of dredging have recently protested in front of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s private residence in an effort to be heard, both national and regional leaders remain deaf to their voices and concerns.

Before the summit, Save The Mekong, an NGO coalition based in Thailand and Cambodia, presented regional leaders attending the Asean forum with a petition opposing plans for additional dams to be built. Some 23,110 residents signed petition postcards protesting two dams planned in Cambodia, two in Thailand and seven in Laos.

But not one of the region’s leaders responded to the petition, nor did they respond to individual letters from the NGO coalition requesting further discussions. In some cases country representatives didn’t even show up for the Asean People’s Forum meeting, leaving it to flounder as civil society representatives walked out in protest.

Other agencies established to monitor and control development on the river have had little effect.

Without consulting its downstream neighbors, or any assessment of the environmental impact, China already has the an eight-dam cascade under way, with two dams completed and three more under construction. According to the International Rivers Web site, the Chinese dams “will drastically change the river’s natural flood-drought cycle and block the transport of sediment, affecting ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions living downstream in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.” Impacts to water levels and fisheries have already been recorded along the Thai-Lao border, the NGO noted.

The Save the Mekong coalition estimates that the new dams will disrupt fish migratory patterns and the endangered Mekong dolphin breeding and feeding grounds. Loss of tourist revenues and damage to the $9.4 billion commercial fishing industry on the river could affect the livelihoods of up to 70 percent of residents, it said. Its research also suggests that many of the dams under discussion also lack public environmental impact assessments.

“Proposals to build dams on the Mekong River’s mainstream epitomize an outdated development model that violates affected people’s rights and fails to ensure sustainable development. There are better ways to meet energy needs without losing the benefits that healthy rivers bring,” said Dr. Carl Middleton, Mekong Program Coordinator of NGO International Rivers, a member of the coalition.

He added that the plans were inconsistent with the Asean charter, as well as being contradictory to the new declaration’s commitments to protect the ecological diversity of the area. International Rivers has also documented the consistent flouting of national laws protecting relocated residents and the environment in Laos, the country planning the most dams.

In the face of such development, it is not surprising that the vague commitments made in the Tokyo Declaration bear little relevance to the delta’s residents.

Regional governments maintain that the power produced by the dams will aid development of a region full of long-suffering poor. But analysts point out that much of the electricity generated will be sold abroad, mainly to Vietnam, with little or no benefit to those displaced during production.

“The planned dams for the mainstream Mekong River and its larger tributaries would have a devastating impact on the world’s most important inland fisheries — those of the Mekong River Basin,” Dr Ian Baird of the University of Victoria, Canada, a prominent scientist on the Mekong Delta, said.

“It is not as if Cambodia and Laos need all these large dams for their own power generation,” Dr Baird said. “A few smaller projects on less important tributaries would be sufficient for domestic use. I think that one of the important questions is not whether Cambodia would benefit from dams, but who would benefit and who would be negatively impacted.”

With this in mind, the Tokyo Declaration is likely to be little more than a failure to the very people it should be protecting. The dream of a “Green Mekong” is distant. Should the dams go ahead, environmental NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund are already warning that the Mekong will become as dead a river as the Yangtze. It will take systematic and sympathetic leadership, they say to prevent such an environmental disaster from developing, but it seems increasingly unlikely that there is any will within the Mekong countries to prevent it, even under Japan’s influence.

Bryony Taylor, a former reporter at the South China Morning Post, is a freelance journalist.

Asia Sentinel