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Environmental alliance demands halt to mega dam projects

The Independent, Bangladesh - 25 November 2000

Environmental alliance demandshalt to mega dam projects

BANGKOK, Nov 24: Asian environmental groups Friday called for an immediate halt to the construction of mega dams in the region while a new report by the World Commission on Dams (WCD) is reviewed, reports AFP.

The report, released in London last week, said the dams had failed to deliver promised benefits and had caused serious harm to rural communities, as well as environmental devastation on a massive scale. Rivers Watch East and Southeast Asia, a network of organisations working to restore the region's waterways, said construction must stop until efforts were made to compensate dam-affected communities. "We demand a moratorium on large dam construction in east and southeast Asia until the recommendations of the WCD have been implemented by all dam-building agencies," it said in a statement.

Anti-dam organisations from around the world met in the Thai capital Friday to discuss the implications of the report by the independent body.

The two-year study, prepared by engineers, ecologists, government officials and indigenous people, had the backing and participation of the World Bank. However, it stopped short of calling for a moratorium on dam construction.

"Indigenous peoples have unique needs and if these are ignored it may result in a tragedy one may term cultural ethnocide," said Shamila Annie Mohammed Ariffin of Friends of the Earth Malaysia.

Families affected by the Bakun Hydroelectric project in Sarawak were subsisting on one meal a day of rice and salt after losing the river which had been the source of their livelihood, she said.

"More often than not, dams bring these people more economic exclusion ... nowhere more so than in the Mekong Delta Basin," considered by many to contain the world's most abundant untapped resources, said Ngun Win of Oxfam America.

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