Unmaking the Mekong: How Hydropower Couples the Social, Political, and Environmental on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap

Abstract

The ongoing construction of Chinese-funded hydroelectric dams in the upper Mekong region interferes with sediment flow, fish migration, and flood pulse of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake. These changes reduce the diversity of fish and the area of land available for rice cultivation, jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of Cambodians who depend directly on the lake. Governments and NGOs have addressed this crisis through education and infrastructure programs, scientific research, and legislation. I argue that these responses fail because they address each aspect of the crisis in isolation, ignoring the coupling between land and water and the social and legal barriers to the political mobilization of local people. Using the testimonies of local people and public statements by government officials and international aid organizations, I discuss the connection between the social, political, and environmental issues around the lake and the incentive systems which work against a holistic approach.

Introduction

During the wet season, the bright blue and green homes of Kampong Khleang floating village, located in Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, sit atop a flooded forest. Residents tie their homes to trees which poke at the surface.^[1] The waterways between homes are filled with the traffic of everyday life, from youths racing in boats decked out with car engines to school children paddling to class.^[2] The village and the flooded forest exist in symbiosis. The forest protects the village from waves and winds during storms and provides nutrient-rich soil which fuels the lake’s annual ecological explosion.^[3] The villagers protect the flooded forest from extraction by the lumber and cash crop industries. In 2013, the villagers successfully incorporated the Ghost Forest, a patch of old growth used as a burial site, into a conservation zone with support from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).^[4] When the dry season arrives, the lake drains out of the Tonle Sap River into the Mekong River Delta and the footprint of the lake decreases fivefold. The residents of Kampong Khleang navigate their homes deep into the lake for dry season fishing or move close to dry land for rice cultivation.^[5]

Kampong Khleang is just one of hundreds of floating villages on the Tonle Sap which only account for a fraction of the over one million whose livelihoods depend directly on the lake.^[6] The Tonle Sap produces more than 500,000 tons of freshwater fish per year and provides Cambodia’s people with 60% of their animal protein intake.^[7] The fishing industry has an estimated annual worth of two billion U.S. dollars, accounting for over 15% of Cambodia’s GDP.^[8] Fishing as a way of life is inseparable from the Cambodian identity. Because fishing is only possible for part of the year, fishermen ferment their catch into a paste known as prahok, a staple of Cambodian cuisine.^[9] The arrival of the dry season marks the Celebration of the Seven-Headed Snake, a series of canoe races which pay tribute to local folklore.^[10] Cambodia’s currency, the riel, shares its name with a small silver carp common to the lake. This cultural investment and the lake’s annual expansion and contraction earn the lake the epithet “Cambodia’s beating heart.”^[11] That beating heart is now critical condition.

According to Heng Kong, a local Ph.D. student studying dai fisheries, the catch has fallen dramatically over the past ten years. “It decreased around 40 to 50%,” he notes.^[12] Kong’s observations are corroborated by local fishermen and ecologists and indicate a widespread trend of decreased fish yields around the lake.^[13] This trend is coupled with a reduced flood pulse, increased erosion, and increased frequency of floods and droughts. These changes threaten the survival of subsistence fishers and farmers. The crisis is insidious because it has neither a singular cause nor effect. Human-caused climate change,^[14] deforestation, overpopulation, overfishing, sand dredging,^[15] and the construction of hydroelectric dams all contribute to the decreased catch, although the relative importance of each is a subject of debate. Responses to the crisis tend to reduce it to simple causal structures. While such reductionist moves might be made in good faith and simply constitute the path of least resistance through existing bureaucratic structures, they can also be used as a method of pacification and control. In this paper, I show how the impact of dams on the Tonle Sap breaks down the barriers between social, political, and environmental issues.

Politics of Chinese Hydropower

To understand the Tonle Sap crisis, we must begin at the source of the Mekong River in the Tibetan plateau, which feeds the Tonle Sap Lake during the wet season. Retreating from the plateau, the river runs through China’s sparsely populated Yunnan Province. Hydropower is China’s second-largest energy resource, and China is now in its thirteenth five-year hydropower development plan.^[16] China’s hydropower industry operates under General Secretary Xi Jinping’s “clear waters and green mountains” environmental policy which divides development into stages. In the first stage, the environment is sacrificed for rapid economic growth.^[17] China’s early dams prioritized power generation over the preservation of fish migration channels and sediment flows. China currently operates ten dams in the Mekong River and plans to build nine more by 2030, a self-imposed deadline to peak its carbon emissions.^[18]

International audiences naturally associate hydropower with the global effort to curb carbon emissions, making it easy for China’s hydropower lobby to justify projects by focusing the discussion on clean energy. However, hydropower development produces environmental and social externalities. First, upwards of eight million people—most of them ethnic minorities—will be forced to relocate before China’s last dam is built in 2030, most of them ethnic minorities.^[19] The hydropower lobby pins protests by Chinese grassroot organizations as foreign interest campaigns designed to stymie China’s economic growth. Second, China’s current hydropower capacity is underutilized due to congestion in China’s national power grid and a political economy which still favors coal as the main power source for China’s most populous coastal provinces.^[20] As a result, electricity in Yunnan is dirt-cheap, driving an influx of cryptocurrency miners and industrial plants which threaten the province’s relatively undeveloped natural environment.^[21] Third, environmental externalities are transnational. It is not China, but the nations of the lower Mekong region who shoulder the most severe consequences of China’s hydropower development. This region includes Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The ontological divide between upper and lower Mekong is embedded in China’s language, where the Mekong is called the Lancang River. Many Chinese people are not aware that the Lancang and the Mekong are the same river.^[22]

China has addressed local environmental concerns by shifting the focus to hydropower investment in the lower Mekong region. The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism allows China to claim emissions offsets from renewable energy projects that it funds in the lower Mekong.^[23] Until the 1990s, political instability made the region too risky for hydropower investment, but the relative peace of the last two decades has attracted investors. Due to environmental concerns, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank are reluctant to provide loans for hydropower projects in the lower Mekong, opening an economic niche for Chinese financial institutions.^[24] The nations of the lower Mekong region have generally been receptive to Chinese investment, seeing it as a ticket into the world economy. Laos, a landlocked country, aims to become “the battery of Southeast Asia,” with its main source of revenue coming from the sale of hydropower by 2025.^[25] Figure 1 shows the current and future hydropower development in Laos and Cambodia. Although this development will devastate the Tonle Sap region, Cambodia does not have the political leverage to push back because China is Cambodia’s most important trading partner. Cambodia cannot trade freely with the European Union due to human rights violations but in 2021, Cambodia and China ratified a bilateral free trade agreement.^[26]

The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) depicts Chinese-funded hydropower as a source of national pride. In a video released by The Khmer Times, which has a strong pro-CPP bias, an engineer working on the Lower Sesan II dam expresses gratitude towards the dam’s patron, the China Huaneng Group: “This company is one of the 500 biggest in the world. I am very proud.”^[27] The video also depicts Lower Sesan II Co. LTD giving scholarships to outstanding students at Srel Kol, a local elementary school. It is tempting to criticize the Cambodian government for capitalizing on hydropower to the detriment of its vulnerable populations. However, given the near inevitability of China’s continued hydropower development, there is little incentive for the Cambodian government to take a moral stance against development.

Figure 1. Current and future hydropower development projects on the Mekong mainstream in China and the lower Mekong region.^[28] Red lines represent operational dams, yellow lines represent planned dams, and blue lines represent postponed dams.

Coupling of Land and Water

Just like the causes of the crisis, the environmental impact of dams on the Tonle Sap is multi-faceted. The dams decrease water quality, interfere with fish migration, and trap fish eggs in reservoirs. However, the most severe impact comes from the regulation of the Mekong’s flow, which dampens the annual oscillations of the lake and reduces the area of flooded forest. According to Taber Hand, founder of Wetlands Word, a Cambodian nonprofit, “When you screw up the flood pulse, you screw up a very, very complicated, dynamic system.”^[29] During the wet season, the lake is smaller, has a lower carrying capacity, and deposits fewer nutrients. During the dry season, the lake is larger, so less land is available for rice cultivation.

In response to the decreasing viability of the traditional way of life, local people have found other ways to make a living including crop farming, livestock raising, and wage labor. One resident of Santey farming village explained “Six years ago, I quit fishing because I could not catch as many fish in the streams because fish became less abundant. Then I started to do vegetable farming and raised chickens instead of fishing.”^[30] When one resource is threatened, local people shift their reliance to other resources in a phenomenon known as “productive bricolage.”^[31] Taken to the extreme, this can lead to the overexploitation of remaining resources.

The Cambodian government fails to account for how productive bricolage couples land and water management. Cambodia’s census gives individuals an option to choose farming or fishing as a livelihood, but not both.^[32] As a result, the government grossly underestimates the impact of hydropower projects. As Ben Anderson states, “the fiction of the census is that everyone is in it.”^[33] Anderson argues that census categories are a form of state control descended from the colonial imagination. In this case, the census categories enable the Cambodian government to neglect form of livelihood that would complicate its policy decisions. A common government argument in favor of dams says that the reservoirs created by dams will benefit fishermen. However, this argument ignores the fact that any benefit is offset by the loss of land for agriculture.

Those who chose to stay around the lake are adapting using indigenous knowledge (IK). For example, local fishermen have gradually transitioned from traditional fishing methods such as dai fishing to using a Proyong, a seine net with lead sinkers, because the water has become too shallow and muddy.^[34] In shallow water, fishermen drag the Proyong through the water for about a kilometer. Local fishermen report that the knowledge about making and using the Proyong spread from village to village, originating in fishing villages on streams which used smaller versions.^[35] IK allows villagers to adapt to changing conditions in the short term. However, IK only addresses the elements of the crisis which are immediately relevant to the lives of the Cambodian people. For local people, local causes such as illegal fishing and deforestation are more salient than Chinese dams, whose remoteness adds a layer of abstraction. Local people recognize the incompleteness of IK. For example, they rely on smartphones, TV, and radio in addition to IK to predict rainfall patterns.^[36] However, the government does not reciprocate by recognizing IK as legitimate.

Antipolitics of International Aid

The Tonle Sap crisis has spawned countless programs funded by international organizations and NGOs, including the U.N. Population Fund, Japan’s International Cooperation Agency, and the U.N. Development Program.^[37] Many programs focus on the ecological and social dimensions of the crisis. The Commercialization of Aquaculture for Sustainable Trade (CAST) Cambodia program, funded by a $17.1 million investment from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, runs demonstration fish farms, encourages compliance with sanitation standards, and supports the growth of local fisheries.^[38] However, few programs address the political dimensions of the crisis, including the political systems which incentivize hydropower development in China and the lower Mekong region. This depoliticization is symptomatic of the global phenomenon of antipolitics in international aid, which obscures the power-structures embedded within development projects.^[39]

One of the largest organizations addressing the crisis is the Mekong Region Commission (MRC), an intergovernmental organization which includes the nations of the lower Mekong region. China has refused to join the MRC despite multiple offers.^[40] However, even without Chinese participation, the MRC aligns itself with Chinese interest in hydropower development on the Mekong. In 2017, MRC CEO Dr. Pham Tuan Phan remarked in an interview that “hydropower development does not kill the Mekong.”^[41] The MRC consistently approves new hydropower projects because it assesses the impact of individual dams but lacks an integrated environmental assessment, allowing each dam to be justified in isolation.^[42] The depoliticization of the crisis means that the MRC is incapable of the self-assessment required to dislodge Chinese influence.

International aid programs around the Tonle Sap also fail to engage with local people, in part due to their transient nature. According to Sen Try, an official of Plov Tuok commune, “These programs… just focused on physical infrastructure — posters, boats, and other equipment.”^[43] These sentiments are reflected by a recent generation of progressive activists in Cambodia who have become disillusioned with the myth of the international community as a benevolent liberalizing force. One activist said, “I believe that these days, they seem to set Cambodia aside and that they don’t really care about it like before anymore.”^[44]

Another source of international attention comes from climate scientists, who make detailed predictions about the impact of new hydropower projects using sophisticated computer models of the Mekong and Tonle Sap. However, these models fail to influence policy due to a lack of functioning science policy interface in Cambodia.^[45] Modelers propose politically decontextualized and unrealistic recommendations to policy makers and then express moral outrage when their recommendations are ignored. The Mekong acts as a research sandbox, continuously generating publishable research even though the general situation is well-known. The problem is not unique to the physical sciences; social scientists continuously diagnose the already well-known incentive systems that drive the Tonle Sap crisis without effecting substantive change.^[46]

Legal and Social Barriers

Policy change addressing hydropower development should be driven by consolidating the political will of local people. However, existing legal and social structures work against this kind of consolidation. The Tonle Sap is governed by the 1987 Fiat Fisheries Law, which is based on even older colonial legislation.^[47] The law divides fisheries into limited and open-access fisheries. Limited fisheries include the most productive areas and are sectioned into lots for large-scale operations.^[48] Open-access fisheries do not contribute to the public treasury, so the Cambodian government has no financial incentive to impose additional regulation. The result is a tragedy of the commons in which smallholders are driven by competition to exploit the Tonle Sap to their own detriment. Sok Panha, a Kampong Khleang fisherman, explains that “all the fishing you see on the lake is done with illegal nets and traps and to use these methods on the lake, all of the fishermen pay bribes to the local police.”^[49] The competitive environment shrinks the notion of community around the Tonle Sap to individual communes and villages. The management of fishing on the Tonle Sap cannot be disentangled from the management of social relations between different communes and ethnic groups.

Panha, a native Khmer, expresses his resentment against the Vietnamese, claiming that they “have an advantage because they live on floating boats and can easily access good fishing grounds.”^[50] The deep-seated hatred of the ethnic Vietnamese may be the largest barrier to political mobilization on the Tonle Sap. Native Khmer refer to Vietnamese as yuon, a slur that roughly translates to “savage.”^[51] Despite the long history of Vietnamese in the region, many Khmer feel that Vietnamese have encroached on their lands. In March 1998, a number of ethnic Vietnamese fishermen were ambushed by Khmer Rouge rebels around the Great Lake. At least 20 people were killed.^[52]

Yale anthropologist James Scott describes the Mekong region as a “zone of refuge” for ethnic groups fleeing China, Vietnam, and Thailand.^[53] Many Vietnamese around the Tonle Sap can trace their roots back to refugee groups fleeing Southern Vietnam centuries ago during the Trinh-Nguyen War.^[54] Before the Cambodian genocide, the Vietnamese were Cambodia’s largest ethnic minority with a population of 450,000.^[55] From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge almost entirely eradicated Vietnamese Cambodians through deportation, labor camps, and massacres.[56] After the fall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979, tens of thousands of Vietnamese repatriated. However, many Vietnamese had no way to prove their Cambodian citizenship because their documentation was confiscated or destroyed.^[57] Cambodia is not a signatory of the 1954 Stateless Persons Convention, so stateless Vietnamese do not have basic rights including the right to own property.^[58] Unable to own land, Vietnamese are forced into floating villages.

The hatred of Vietnamese is reflected at the government level by relocation programs that often target ethnic Vietnamese floating villages. According to deputy provincial governor Sun Sovannarith, “The purpose of relocating them from the floating villages is because we want to protect natural resources, the environment and biodiversity.”^[59] However, the Cambodian government also has another motive. Sovannarith continues, “We will [beautify the lake] from being full of floating houses to a tourist attraction.”^[60] In parallel to the productive bricolage of local people, threats to the fishing industry cause the government to shift reliance to other industries such as tourism, leading to a rise in corruption and exploitation in those secondary industries. Nearly every Cambodian industry is affected by the Tonle Sap crisis, not just fishing and agriculture.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have shown that the role of Chinese-funded hydroelectric dams in the Tonle Sap crisis entangles environmental, social, and political issues. First, I discussed how the politics of Chinese hydropower obscure the transnational nature of environmental externalities. Next, I showed how the Cambodian government fails to recognize IK and the coupling of land and water management. Then, I discussed how the antipolitics of international aid and scientific research mitigate their positive impact. Finally, I discussed the legal and social barriers that work against the political mobilization of local people. While I analyzed each of these aspects separately, they are entangled in ways that perpetuate the crisis. For example, the political influence of China’s hydropower lobby discourages international aid organizations from implicating China in the crisis.

No single entity is equipped to address the Tonle Sap crisis holistically. Politicians have incentives to exploit populations and maintain international trade relations. The culture of international aid organizations and academia prevents them from addressing the political dimensions of the crisis. Local people do not have the resources or perspective to directly address hydropower development. Some organizations can describe the crisis holistically, such as International Rivers, which launched the “Mekong Mainstream Dams Campaign” to advocate for an end to hydropower development on the Mekong.^[61] However, these organizations lack the power to enact or influence policy. An effective holistic approach needs to combine the perspective of organizations like International Rivers with the political will of local people. The first step is initiating a dialogue where these entities have equal footing. A large enough coalition may have the ability to pressure the CPP into meaningfully addressing China’s role in the Tonle Sap crisis. These efforts will only be possible if global understanding of the crisis improves, and leaders actively work against the tendency to depoliticize. Perhaps, Cambodia’s beating heart will grow strong again.