Thomas Fuller in the NYT:

China has built three hydroelectric dams on the Mekong…Laos is planning so many dams on the Mekong and its tributaries — 7 of about 70 have been completed…Cambodia is planning two dams. At the same time, the dashed dreams of French colonizers to use the river as a southern gateway to China are being partly realized: After Chinese engineers dynamited a series of rapids and rocks in the early part of this decade, trade by riverboat between China and Thailand increased by close to 50 percent.

The cargo passes through increasingly populated areas, erstwhile sleepy cities in Laos that are now teeming with tourists and defying the economic downturn with swinging construction cranes. Many parts of the Mekong were once a stargazer’s dream; now nights on the river are increasingly glaring with electric lights.

Environmentalists worry that the rush to develop the Mekong, particularly the dams, is not only changing the panorama of the river but could also destroy the livelihoods of people who have depended on it for centuries.
…
“The dams are a very big issue for the 60 million people in the Mekong basin,” said Milton Osborne, visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia, and the author of several books on the Mekong. “People depend in very substantial ways on the bounty of the Mekong.”

BP: An interesting article. The Mekong is a river that runs through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and therefore you get the problem of one country using the river which impacts on the river’s use by people in another country. This is why there is the Mekong River Commission, although Burma and China are not members, which exists “to promote and co-ordinate sustainable management and development of water and related resources for the countries’ mutual benefit and the people’s well-being by implementing strategic programmes and activities and providing scientific information and policy advice”. Read that Wikipedia article on the Mekong River Commission and ask, is the Commission doing its job?