Mekong effort fails after years of lavish foreign funding

BANGKOK (AP) — When Western governments began pouring money into the Mekong River Commission, they hoped it would help four Southeast Asian countries cooperate in responsibly managing one of the world's great rivers.

Two decades later, they have a surfeit of disregarded reports to show for the $320 million they spent, and a cascade of hydro power developments that benefit the narrow interests of dam builders but are ravaging the river basin, a crucial source of rice, fish and livelihoods for 60 million people.

Before that, the commission's reputation was already hanging by a thread; it paid several million dollars for a scientific study that recommended a 10-year moratorium on dam building but it was not adopted as an official document because of disagreement among the member countries.

The largest donor, Denmark, provided $86 million of Danish taxpayer money to the commission since 1995 before ending its funding last year, said Kurt Morck Jensen, chief technical adviser to Denmark's development agency during that period.

— Cast doubts the commission could accurately predict the effects of mainstream dams on fisheries and agriculture or know the threshold at which the river's development would reach a damaging point of no return;

Philip Hirsch, a professor of human geography at Sydney University and a Mekong expert, said donor money also paid for valuable scientific research.

Earlier this year, a study funded by Vietnam predicted Mekong Delta rice production would drop steeply because up to nine mainstream dams planned by Laos would trap sediments, reducing nutrients flowing downstream, and reduce fish stocks by disrupting migratory breeding.

The commission is also belatedly developing a tool to assess the environmental impact of dams across borders and hopes to complete its long-delayed comprehensive study into development of the river.