Asia: Dams threaten "millions of Mekong livelihoods"

For thousands of years, the Mekong River has nourished civilizations and housed one of the world's most diverse populations of fish and plants. Yet 17 dams recently built on the Mekong and its tributaries in China, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as 11 more in the planning process, are threatening Mekong fisheries–and thereby the food security they have provided for millions, critics warn. "People affected could number in the millions, due to the extensive changes expected to the river's ecosystem downstream," Aviva Imhof, campaigns director of International Rivers, an NGO based in California, told IRIN. Most alarming, NGOs say, is a cascade of eight dams being built in the Upper Mekong in China, the origin of Southeast Asia's largest river, which could alter the ecosystem downstream for Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Of the eight dams in China, four have been completed. NGOs claim they are already undermining fish populations and causing erosion in downstream Myanmar, northern Thailand and northern Laos. The dams are allegedly blocking Mekong fish from travelling upstream to spawn, threatening fisheries.