Thai dam casts long shadow over Asia dam wars

PAK MUN RIVER, Thailand, June 26 (Reuters) Mekong fish don't jump. It was one of the many hard lessons learned at Thailand's Pak Mun Dam, a minnow as dams go, but it casts a long and costly shadow over Asia's water wars.

Built more than a decade ago on a tributary of the Mekong river, Pak Mun left a legacy of angry protests, damaged fish stocks and uprooted communities and a fish ladder more suited to leaping Pacific salmon.

''It created huge conflicts in Thailand that last today and it produces very little power. When you consider all the lives disrupted, you have to ask was it worth it?,'' said James Fahn, a journalist and author who covered the Pak Mun saga.

The furore over Pak Mun has blocked new dam construction in Thailand, prompting the state utility, Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), to back hydro-electric projects in neighbouring Laos and Myanmar out of the reach of Thai environmentalists.

Dam proponents such as the World Bank say future projects such as Nam Theun II in Laos, soon to be Southeast Asia's biggest dam, will benefit from lessons learned at Pak Mun.

But anti-dam campaigners, who fear more Pak Muns are in the making, want Thailand to seek alternative sources of power.

''Don't let them build it,'' advises Thongcharoen Srihadhamma, a fisherman-turned-protest leader in the 1990s when mass sit-ins against Pak Mun dominated newspaper headlines.

''This is like a slow tsunami. The destruction cannot be reversed. Nature cannot be rebuilt,'' he told Reuters during a visit to the dam once touted as an economic driver for the poor northeast province of Ubon Ratchathani.

''CRITICAL LAPSES'' The 17-metre (56-ft) high dam, about 5 km from the confluence of the Pak Mun and Mekong rivers, was beset by problems from the start.

Cost overruns pushed its price tag up 68 percent to 6.6 billion baht, with nearly 16 million dollars in unanticipated compensation payments for lost fisheries.

About 1,700 households were displaced, far higher than the 241 initially expected.

Unable to adjust to life away from the river, some families abandoned the new homes they received as compensation and moved away to seek jobs or better land to grow crops.

''We call them spirit houses because nobody lives in them any more,'' Thongcharoen said of a relocation programme that went awry because local people were not consulted properly.

The U.N.-backed World Commission on Dams said in its comprehensive 2000 study of Pak Mun: ''It is unlikely that the project would have been built in the current context''.

It said that a failure to study the potential impact on fisheries catches fell by 50-100 per cent, affecting 6,000 fishermen had been a ''critical lapse'' in Pak Mun's planning.

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