September in April

It’s been September in April in Kampot. In the week or so centering around Khmer New Year we had close to 12 inches – 30cm – of rain with two very heavy deluges and the rest of the time it was dark and cloudy with lighter rainfalls almost every day. That is exactly what you’d expect in September, our heaviest month which in fact receives an average of 12 inches of precipitation.

This is my eleventh April in Cambodia and I’ve never seen anything like it. At least 3 or 4 of those years saw no precipitation whatever, not a drop. They were characterized by a relentless overbearing heat. In the five years I’ve lived in Kampot my cistern, which collects rainwater from the roof, has gone completely dry twice. This year it never got down to half. Climate Change anyone?

Just before the first torrent we had temperatures in the high 90s – 36-37C – which is very rare for Kampot since we are close to the sea and its moderating effects. Since warmer air holds more moisture, it follows that rainfall will increase with rising temperatures. At some point the use of the term global warming morphed into climate change, and it’s a bit more accurate since, for instance, climate change actually is bringing unusually cold wintry weather to places like the UK. Still, there have now been 336 consecutive months in which global temperature has exceeded the twentieth century average.

Almost all climate change predictions have underestimated the pace of change. That is partly because of the impacts of feedback loops. For instance, when ice, which reflects sunlight melts, leaving much darker blue sea or rock, more heat is absorbed. Each measure of melting then accelerates the loss of additional ice. While there’s no way to definitively attribute individual climate events to man’s impact on the climate, erratic or unusual weather is exactly what the models predict.

Nonetheless, Cambodia is doing its part to make things worse. But first, around the beginning of April there were news reports of  serious power outages in the capital. Why is that, the national electric company was asked, when the Kamchey dam near Kampot is now finished and working? When there’s water behind the dam it can provide almost half of Phnom Penh’s total demand, which is 400 megawatts (but growing at 20 to 25% per year). Unfortunately, in April, the time its power is needed most, there’s (usually) no water so the dam was working at only 10% of capacity. A few days later, representatives of the dam said they’d found a way to conserve water, so could send more juice the capital’s way. Mysteriously, right after that our water pressure went limp. No water at all for a couple hours a day. So water pressure is back with the heavy rain and I expect there’s a lot more water to pass through the generators at the dam.

If it hadn’t started raining, Cambodia’s first coal-fired plant which is due online in June or July, would’ve taken up the slack. At 700 megawatts, it can supply nearly twice the capital’s demand. The nice thing about coal is that it’s relatively cheap, but that’s its only saving grace. Under the best conditions it’ll produce large amounts of CO2. Being built by the Chinese it’ll also almost certainly spew lots of other more immediately toxic gases and particulates into the air. Modern coal plants can be relatively clean on matters other than CO2, but it’s hard to imagine the Chinese builders giving a damn about Cambodia’s air quality, considering China’s own air is among the worst in the world. Air pollution controls make a plant cost a lot more, so it’s extremely unlikely to happen, especially with Cambodia in such a subservient position.

Most new power projects in Cambo, both hydro and coal, are structured as BOT or build, operate, transfer. The developer finances and builds the plant, operates it for 30 or 40 years and then turns it over to the government. Cambodia, in its haste for power and development at any cost, has accepted whatever terms the Chinese – they’re almost all Chinese – have offered. This usually includes penalties for not using power. In other words, if there’s a surplus of power, the government pays anyway. And that’s understandable, nobody’s going to put up hundreds of millions of dollars without some guarantee of payback. Still that could potentially be a very big problem in the future.

Is this exceptionally wet April a harbinger of extreme rainfall later in the season? Impossible to say, but it’s remarkable nonetheless. It could turn hot and dry next week, normal for this time of year, but if it is a portent of things to come we could be in for some serious flooding. As mentioned previously, right at a natural bottleneck in the river, across from the government buildings at the southern end of town, there’s been extensive landfilling, making the river even smaller there.

Being an estuary, thus essentially part of the sea, the water level reflects the tides more than anything else. The exception being in case of very heavy rainfall bringing water down from the mountains combined with a storm surge and high tide that brings large amounts of water in from the sea. In that case, that bottleneck will serve to flood large areas of the city. I’m not looking forward to it.

In other Kampot news the riverside walk is being extended south to the old port, Cambodia’s first port. There are sometimes large fishing boats docked there but mostly it’s for small boats. A wood boardwalk about 1.2 meters wide is being built there, I assume to provide a place for the small fishing boats to dock in the early morning when they return from the sea. There isn’t a lot of development there at present but a lot of property has changed hands and a one hectare lot just south of the government buildings has been cleared – they cut down lots of healthy trees but did leave one sugar palm – so I expect a substantial development is in progress.

At the other end of town river road is in the process of being widened and paved, I believe all the way to the road the leads to dam, about 11 kilometers. That work has involved felling lots of nice old trees which beautifully graced the road, sometimes making a leafy green canopy. That was my favorite bike ride, but no more, it’ll just be a wide busy highway you use to get somewhere, not someplace to take your time and enjoy on a bicycle.

I know progress is inevitable and important and that road had to be done eventually since it was a disaster for anything larger than a motorbike, but I’m still personally disappointed at the loss of  green and tranquility. The one aspect I do have to take exception to is that they’re widening it more than needs to be. That extra capacity won’t be needed at least for the next decade or so, so the trees could’ve remained a little longer, but Cambodian officials love their pavement so they had to go.

Privitize Cambo - Giving Away the Farm

Cambodia now has its first stock exchange and the country’s political and economic leaders are all fired up about entering the world of ‘high’ finance. Well, maybe it’s not that high, but still they are proud of making a beginning.

The first stock listed is Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority, two others to follow are Electricite du Cambodge and Telecom Cambodia. All three are public utilities. All are reasonably well-run though the telecom company, the only one that’s not in a monopoly position and thus subject to market forces, is behind the times and not very competitive.

The capital’s water company is highly regarded amongst developing country public water systems: it’s well run and efficient. That means it’s well placed for privatization and public officials are giddy with having such a good candidate for their new stock market.

For the longest time, as far as everybody including the media was concerned the sell-off of public assets was considered all positive and there was no in-depth reporting as to the details and possible consequences of the move. However, anybody who keeps up with these trends in the world knows that privatizing essential services like water in a low-income country has almost invariably turned into a disaster. As well, private water companies have also often had a well-deserved bad reputation in rich countries. Privatization is also high on the agenda of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and conservative financial and political establishments. They hate to see potential profit centers go unexploited regardless of any possible negative impact on the people served.

There are often good rationales for privatization, since, according to prevailing economic philosophy, publicly owned enterprises are likely to be inefficient, uneconomic, poorly run and repositories for political patronage. Private companies, on the other hand are so well run, or so the ideology goes, they do everything cheaper and better and the people ultimately save money and receive better service by selling off their public enterprises to the free market.

You certainly wouldn’t want a government involved in a competitive market, like making shoes, for instance, as in Soviet times, because it would never work out well. However, if you’re dealing with an absolutely essential service which enjoys a monopoly market position the dynamic is totally different.

The first thing that happens when a public utility turns private is that rates go up. That is ostensibly to extend and improve service; in reality, in most cases, private utilities spend the absolute minimum on improvements, especially if they involve very long paybacks. The only way to keep them honest is to have strong regulatory systems in place, which, in the case of Cambodia, would constitute near miraculous intervention.

The purpose of a privately owned water company is to make a profit, everything else the company does is incidental and secondary to that primary goal. On the other hand, the mission of a public water utility is to provide clean water at the lowest possible price. When providing water, the most essential ingredient of survival, to a population in which many people are living right on the edge of existence, minimum cost is imperative.

Cochabamba, Bolivia provides a good example of the perils of privatizing water. As per the demand of international financial organizations - IMF, World Bank - Cochabamba’s water system was sold off to a multinational corporation. They immediately raised the rates to the point where large numbers of the peasantry could no longer afford water; which resulted in demonstrating and rioting and in no time at all, the utility was back in public hands.

At the very same time that the capital’s water company was put in the process of privatization, a small water provider was privatized in Ratanikkiri Province. Rates nearly doubled along with vastly improved service, but large numbers of people affected by the changes resisted and fought them. The government relented and gave the people a choice, either the old system which provided cheaper but relatively low quality water for about 12 hours a day, or the new privately owned system which offered 24 hour, better quality water at the higher rate. A lot of people, already barely scraping by, chose the cheaper lower quality public service.

So, after about a year of hearing about the privatization of Phnom Penh’s water company, without any details appearing in the media, I wrote to the Cambodia Daily to ask for better, more in-depth coverage. Maybe the information was ready to come out anyway because the stocks were about to be sold, but it turns out that only 15% of the company is being sold so that the municipality will retain complete control. They expect to gain about $20 million they can use for improvements and expansion at a much lower cost than borrowing. So, it may not be such a bad deal for the people after all; still, people don’t invest money without the expectation of returns. Sometimes returns on investment come as a result of rising stock values, but chances are that the utility is going to have to pay dividends so the money will hardly be free and the end result will have to wait for the passage of time.

Cambodia is actually a poster child for the conservative fixation on privatization and free markets. There are few import controls, except occasionally when specific industries are threatened, so Cambodian entrepreneurs are forced to compete. There are also few restrictions on investment, leaving the economy wide open. As often as possible provision of public services and development of public spaces has been left to private investors.

Cambodia is very well positioned to take advantage of this openness compared to surrounding nations. The decimation of the country’s industry and commerce in the Khmer Rouge years took the country all the way down to square one, so it needs a lot of imports for goods it can’t produce itself. Moreover being a small country it can’t really compete for investment in industrial scale operations, though if the ASEAN group ever gets its tariff free zone happening it won’t matter which country an industrial operation is located in.

Higher education provides a good example. The Royal University, founded in the fifties after the country became independent, was Cambodia’s first tertiary institution. The first private university, Norton U., was established in 1997. In the ensuing 15 years some 30 or 40 higher institutions have been opened, meanwhile the Royal U. has remained static, with no investment over the years. It works fine for the government, people get educated and it doesn’t have to pay for it. All it has to do is try to regulate the sector and establish standards, which, in the event, vary wildly. The drawback is the relative high cost of tuition in private institutions. Many potential students are left out because of the dearth of subsidized public education.  

Recent privatizations of public space in Phnom Penh also provide a good example of its pitfalls. In the last few years two large, centrally located pieces of land were traded away to rich Cambodians with no controls whatever. One was the former police headquarters at Streets 154 and 51, the other was the old T-3 prison site at Streets 154 and 13. Both sites are large enough, prominent enough and important enough to have warranted international design competitions. Both could’ve included large developed areas with quality buildings as well as substantial public squares and green spaces. What did we get instead? Most of the former police headquarters is now a public market with adjoining car park. The building is okay but nothing special - a cheap metal-roofed structure with a modicum of interesting design - though to its benefit, it does include a bandstand for music events. However, except for the market stalls fronting the streets, 80% of the stalls remain empty even after years on the market; it’s obviously wasted space. The former T-3 prison site is a hodge-podge of car repair shops, parking lots and buildings that range from non-descript to trashy. A tremendous opportunity for adding quality urban spaces to the city has been lost, at least temporarily: there are no structures of any real value at the T-3 site so a better designed future space is still a possibility.

Dam construction also provides a good example of the trade-offs inherent in depending on others for financing and construction. Cambodia heaps boatloads of gratitude on China and Vietnam for their willingness to fill the country with dams without it having to pay for them, but in the end it may rue the day. Often hidden in the fine print of the contracts are provisions that require Cambodia to not only pay a high price for the energy generated, but also a high price even if the energy’s not needed or produced. That’s leaving aside the environmental degradation and loss of fisheries that is always a corollary to large dam construction.

It makes sense for the dam builders: they’re not going to put hundreds of millions of dollars into dam construction without guarantees that they’ll get a return on their investments. However, so many dams are under construction or in the planning stages in addition to two coal-fired power plants in the works for Sihanoukville - one is a large 700 megawatts - that the country could soon be awash with power and require years of increasing demand before the electricity is needed. For instance, peak power demand in Phnom Penh, which is easily a large majority of the country’s total demand, is 350 megawatts, whereas the one S-ville coal plant, by itself, will produce 700 megawatts. Cambodia may well find itself paying through the nose for power it has no use of.

The other alternative is to become a power supplier to neighboring countries. Electricity from the controversial Lower Sesan Dam in Stung Treng is intended almost exclusively for export to Vietnam. It’s one thing to sacrifice one’s own environment for the sake of needed electricity, but to do so strictly for export is pure folly, the free market gone wild; though in truth, sacrificing one’s land for quick bucks is nothing new and happens as easily in America as it does in developing countries.

  Finally, probably the most discouraging aspect of Cambodia’s give-away-the-farm mentality is the granting of economic land concessions on a grand scale. Twenty-two percent of the country’s entire land surface, nearly 4 million hectares, has already been given away in land and mining concessions and the give-away is continuing apace. That includes large swaths of national parks and conservation areas.

The largest concession - 315,000 hectares which is equal to 3150 square kilometers - was granted in 1997 to a ruling party senator. Even with that vast holding, he still has frequent conflicts with the locals; he can’t stand to let villagers living within the concession have a few hundred hectares… typical of the filthy rich.

That was before a 2005 law that limited concessions to 10,000 hectares, equivalent to 100 square kilometers. However, there are ways to get around that limitation: in one case four adjacent concessions, each nearly 10,000 hectares, have been granted to four companies owned by the same corporation, a Vietnamese one at that. Isn’t it ironic that individual foreigners are not allowed to own small plots of land but immense holdings are granted to foreign corporations?

A prominent CPP lawmaker quoted in the Cambodia Daily strongly defended the practice of granting concessions as important for the country’s development and said the poor people being displaced should be willing to sacrifice for the good of the country. It’s easy for a rich lawmaker to speak about the need for the peasantry to give it all up for their homeland. While many of the villagers displaced by land concessions are given plots of land elsewhere, they’re often either poor quality land or in places where they have a hard time earning money. There will be jobs offered in the rubber, oil palm and sugar plantations but they’ll be low paid, not very desirable jobs. Nearly every concession involves displacing local people or the destruction of the forests they depend on for their livelihood. In some cases, the government discovers years later that the area has been logged, the grantee has pocketed the profits and then has failed to develop the land as proposed. They then yank the concession, but by then the damage has been done.

The plan to convert immense areas of the country into corporate plantations reminds me of the great inequality that exists in many Latin American countries as a result of the colonists taking land that was previously held in common and dividing it up amongst themselves. The result has been that a few percent of the population descended from the original colonists owns almost all of the land. The rest are landless peasants. In a sense, Cambodia is being recolonized: large areas are going from public ownership into corporate ownership.

It’s easy to understand the leadership’s eagerness to give away the farm: they get permit fees and the land is developed without any cost to the government. In my mind, rather than give 10,000 hectares to a corporation, it’d be far better to grant 100 hectares each to 100 people, or 10 hectares each to 1000 people and then provide the training and wherewithal needed to plant the rubber trees, etc. That way the profits and benefits are spread around to large numbers of people rather than the profits going to corporations or the wealthy and the peasantry left with low wage, peon work.

That of course would require planning, investment and organization, rather than simply pocketing the commission fees (both overt and under-the-table) and walking away. Unfortunately, that goes against the prevailing wisdom that corporations always know best and privatization is the only legitimate way to develop a country.

All in all, the mania for giving away the farm may well bring development to the country - rubber, oil palm and sugar cane are all likely to be in high demand in the future - but it’s a very big question whether that growth will benefit the people at large. It may turn out to be a classic case of the folly of trickle-down economics where, in the event, a lot of money goes directly to the top, while only a pittance trickles down to the bottom.

I don’t doubt that Cambodia’s public officials are sincere in their beliefs that they’re doing the right thing for the country, whether or not they are personally benefiting. There’s also no question that development is desperately needed, but in their zeal to give away the farm I fear they will also be giving up a lot more and that all Cambodians, outside of the elite few, will, in the final tally, be losing out.

Dam It

Laos is going ahead with plans to build the 1200 megawatt Xayaburi dam on the mainstream of the Mekong river just inside the Laos – Cambodia border. That is happening in spite of opposition by the other three members of the Mekong River Commission – Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Laos wants to be earn money by being the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia. All three other countries are currently experiencing power supply problems so there definitely is a market for power, though if all planned dams were built the current shortage would turn into a huge surplus. Electricity consumption in Cambodia is growing at about 25% a year and as we all know from frequent blackouts for now the country can barely keep up.

There are valid reasons why a country would want to develop its hydropower resources. Primarily, it’s relatively cheap, and once the dam is built, the cost of power isn’t going to rise.

It’s indigenous, so doesn’t require the use of foreign exchange to purchase fuel from outside. Cambodia now gets 90% of its in-country produced power from burning fossil fuels. Vietnam is now supplying a substantial amount of power mostly because of the Prime Minister’s entreaties, since they have a close relationship. They’re doing that somewhat reluctantly since they’re experiencing their own supply problems. Cambodia is in the process of converting its power plants from relatively expensive diesel to much cheaper bunker oil – fuel used on ships – but it’s still very expensive.

Hydropower is renewable and clean and produces no greenhouse gases, its greatest benefit. It concurrently has lots of downsides and the social and environmental impacts should be taken seriously. There are always trade-offs: sometimes they are relatively benign and in balance make the location worthy of hydro development.

Dams often involve dislocation of large numbers of people or inundation of substantial areas of forest or farmland. The farmland is an especial loss, since if it’s part of the flood plain, it’s the most fertile, highest quality land. Damming a steep mountain canyon would involve the loss of forest and wildlife habitat. There’s also the loss of scenic areas. China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, is a case in point: One of the most spectacular scenic areas in the world has been inundated.

In some areas reservoirs created by dams become toxic soups - China, again makes a good example. The raw sewage and industrial pollution that flows on to the sea in a free-flowing river is bad enough, but when that noxious concoction becomes trapped behind a dam it festers in a witches brew and is arguably much worse for the environment. On the other hand if the water is coming off an uninhabited mountainous area, the reservoir can be an important recreation site for boating, fishing and even windsurfing in areas that are sufficiently breezy.

In the case of Laos’ Xayaburi dam or any dam built across the mainstream of the Mekong river in its lower reaches, the greatest impact will be on fisheries. Cambodians get 80% of their protein from fish and a large part of that is from the Mekong/Tonle Sap system. It’s been estimated that 70% of the migratory fish in the Mekong would be cut off from their upriver spawning grounds by the Xayaburi dam. Damming the mainstream also threatens the natural flow of water up into Tonle Sap Lake and spells ruin if the Mekong’s overflow isn’t sufficient to fill the lake.

Part of the way dams work is they store water during wet seasons to be released later in the dry, thus evening out power production and minimizing flooding. But once again that potentially spells disaster since the Tonle Sap depends on flooding to bring nutrients up with the overflow of the Mekong. China already has several dams across its section of the Mekong but only 15% of the total flow comes from China. Nevertheless, that margin might be enough to cause the system to crash if too much water is withheld. By the time Laos builds the dozen or so dams it is planning across the Mekong the Tonle Sap fisheries may well be toast. One smaller problem with depending on dams for power production is that they produce the least power – in the hot dry season – when it’s needed the most.

A public official, when asked about the loss of fisheries from dam building, stated something to the effect that some people had to sacrifice so everybody could have power. Easy for him to say since he needs power for air-conditioning and other middle-class creature comforts, whereas the peasantry loses its sustenance.

The Columbia River in America’s Pacific Northwest provides a good example of the results of that kind of thinking. The Columbia is America’s second largest river. The dams built across it starting in the 1930’s provide the area with some of the cheapest electricity in America, but they also destroyed one of the most productive salmon fisheries in the world. Salmon are anadromous fish that live most of their lives in the sea but return to freshwater rivers to spawn. After three years roaming the seas they return to the very spot - within a very small margin - they were hatched to spawn and create another generation. Quite amazing really to think of fish knowing where they were born.

Before the dams were built there were between ten and sixteen million salmon a year returning to the Columbia. Some traveled as much as 600 miles upstream to spawn. Today there are about 100,000 and most of those are hatchery fish which are grown upstream in controlled conditions and shipped in trucks past the dams. A newsreel clip from the 30’s summed up the trade-off. It said, Say goodbye to the salmon, progress is coming to the Columbia River. So a minimum ten million salmon per year ranging from 20 to 40 kilos each were exchanged for cheap power. The electricity supply created by the dams was so much greater than regional demand that aluminum smelters, which use vast amounts of power in the smelting process, were encouraged to locate there with additional subsidies over and above the already cheap rates.

Before the dams salmon were so easy to catch that Native Americans fed them to their dogs and any half way decent fisherman could have as much as he/she wanted. They were so cheap to purchase that everybody else could also have their fill. Even today there are only about 4 million people in the Columbia Basin so there would’ve been plenty for all. Wild salmon today are very expensive. Farmed salmon are available at a more reasonable price – though still not cheap - but as an indicator of their unnatural lifestyle, they have to be fed salmon coloring to look real.

The dams could’ve been designed with fish ladders to allow salmon passage but that wasn’t considered important at the time. Today, there’s talk of removing the dams as well as spending vast sums to adapt the dams for the salmon. Though the giant ones across the mainstream of the Columbia are likely to be around for a while, many smaller dams in the area are being decommissioned to allow for the return of free-flowing rivers. Many were built with 50 year operating licenses and when they come up for renewal they have to be adapted to conform to stringent new rules for fish passage. In some cases the new rules are so expensive to implement, the utilities find it cheaper to decommission the dams than conform.

Today Southeast Asia is at the beginning of the dam building cycle. Everybody is all fired up about producing as much power as possible. Laos has plans to produce far more than they will ever need themselves. Cambodia has around ten dams under construction or in later planning stages in its smaller rivers, plus it has its own plans for damming the mainstream of the Mekong. China, with its deep pockets, is eager to finance them. This, needless to say, is a mixed blessing. When asked about China’s dam builders’ commitment to environmental protection, a public official remarked that they follow the same rules as in China so why worry? Some reassurance there.

Sinohydro, the Chinese company that’s building the Kamchey Dam on the Kampot River in the mountains about 12 kilometers above the city, was the builder of the Three Gorges dam in China. Because of shoddy work done there it is banned from building any more dams in its home country… but there’s always work to do in countries like Cambodia. The great Kampot flood of 2009 was caused at least in part by a breach in the dam, though both company and government vehemently denied that.

What we call the Kampot river is actually called Kompong Bay and is an estuary, a tidal river which ebbs and flows with the tides. The city sits right at sea level so is vulnerable to flooding when, as happened in 2009, a strong storm surge during high tide comes in from the ocean at the same time that heavy rains come off the mountains. During that flood a local resident heard rock trucks heading up to the dam all night and early into the morning when normally they quit at dark. A friend, who’s been in the area for 15 years sent one of his Khmer staff up to check out the dam: he managed to get by the guards to see a gaping breach in the dam, evidently caused by the heavy storms. Now there’s nothing unusual about flooding in Kampot, it happens with regularity, but in that case it was exacerbated by negligence, incompetence or miscalculation on the part of Sinohydro.

But beggars can’t be choosers. If you are desperate for power to fuel a rapidly expanding economy and somebody comes by with a fully funded dam proposal you jump at the chance. You are so grateful you don’t concern yourself with the fine print. Needless to say, the Chinese are skillful negotiators and they don’t build dams in Cambodia out of the good of their hearts. As a result some of the dams under construction here come with onerous terms which require the government to pay substantial compensation to the dam owners even when the electricity isn’t needed or used. While the main point of constructing dams is access to cheap power, it won’t be anywhere near as cheap as it could’ve been if the government had a stronger bargaining position.

Moreover, similar to the excess power produced on the Columbia River, Cambodia has plans for hydropower production that currently far surpasses its needs. The Lower Sesan River II dam which is nearing construction phase in Stung Treng province is a case in point. Vietnam is financing that project to the tune of $800 million. It will produce 400 megawatts of power, most of which will be exported to Vietnam. The entire city of Phnom Penh consumes about 300 megawatts so in comparison very little of that 400 mw will be used in Cambodia’s sparsely populated northeast. Meanwhile, the human and environmental cost will be substantial. To begin with, five thousand people will be displaced and 30,000 hectares of farm and forest lands will be submerged. In addition as many as 100,000 people will see their fish catches reduced. The dam will also impact at least a dozen fish species that migrate between the Tonle Sap and the Sesan River and its tributaries. Cambodia will essentially be sacrificing its environment and the livelihoods of large numbers of its people in order to sell power to Vietnam.  

Smaller dams like the Sesan II have less impact on people and the environment than the giant dams proposed for the mainstream of the Mekong but everybody likes to think big and bigger projects pencil out better so they’re always preferred by dam builders and policy makers. Small dams can have severe impacts on local people, but at least they generally don’t wreck the whole system.

It’s easy for a rich government official to say some people have to sacrifice so everybody can have power but what he’s really talking about is many people losing their sustenance and livelihoods so others like him can air-condition their mansions.

It’ll be a sad day if Laos goes ahead with its plans for the Xayaburi dam in spite of the opposition of its neighbors but it won’t be the first time an ecosystem has been unnecessarily degraded to the detriment of many because of the blindness of the few.