document." The dam blu

Resources Conservation and Development, an NGO based in the northern Vietnam city of Hanoi. Vietnamese scientists have also said "the project should be stopped," Khanh added during a telephone interview from the Vietnamese capital. "Vietnam’s silence about this dam has been broken."

For its part, the Laotian government is still sticking to its plan. "We are confident that the Xayaburi Hydroelectric Power Project will not have any significant impact on the Mekong mainstream," officials from Vientiane (the capital of Laos) have explained in a note to the Mekong River experts. Mekong experts from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam—the four countries that share the waters of the lower Mekong—are meeting in late March to approve the Xayaburi dam plans.

Laos has appealed to its neighbours not to place any roadblocks. The government does not want to raise the political stakes to the point of being compelled to get its dam blueprint approved by ministers or even prime ministers. "There will be no need for any extension of time and no need to forward this matter to the (ministerial) level," revealed the note by the Laotian government to Mekong River experts.

This dam issue has become the first major test of environmental diplomacy for the four countries in the lower Mekong, members of the Mekong River Commission (MRC). An inter-governmental body that came up after a 1995 agreement, the Vientiane-based body aims to manage the development of the Mekong basin in consensus. Any plan to dam the Mekong has to be scrutinised for its cross-border impact under a special mechanism, formally known as the Procedure for Notification Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). "This is the first time that we are going through the prior consultation process," Jeremy Bird, MRC’s chief executive officer, told IPS. "Countries do not have a veto right (to stop a dam being built in a neighbouring country) yet countries cannot proceed without consultation."

The MRC’s members have to weigh the provision in the agreement that "a country cannot act irresponsibly to impact its neighbour" against every member’s "right not to agree" and ability to "take its own decision," added Rudi Veestraeten, Belgium’s envoy to Thailand. MRC is funded by Belgium, along with other European countries, Australia and Canada. Till now the 4,880-km long Mekong has remained free of dams along its journey through the basin, winding its way past Burma along the four MRC partners till it falls in the South China Sea in southern Vietnam.

But upstream, the river’s flow from its headwaters in the Tibetan plateau through southern China has been harnessed by four dams in China’s Yunnan province, part of a cascade of eight mega dams the Asian giant plans. Local activists, environmentalists and even government experts of the lower Mekong are alarmed. The impact of the Chinese dams on the downstream countries has strengthened the campaigns led by Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA), a Bangkok-based green lobby. TERRA warns that dams on the lower Mekong will affect the lives of 60 million people who depend on food and their livelihood from the river.

"Laos has not helped its case because the government has refused to make public the EIA (environmental impact assessment) it has done for the Xayaburi dam," Premrudee Daoroung, co-director of TERRA, told IPS. "The Laotian government says it is a secret document." The dam blu
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