Land and River Grabbing: The Mekong’s Greatest Challenge

07-Land-and-River-Grabbing-2015 sm Throughout the Mekong region, large-scale development projects such as hydropower dams, mines, conventional power plants, and mono-crop plantations are displacing communities and limiting access to natural resources. Several hydropower dams have already been built on the Upper Mekong in China’s Yunnan Province, and the governments of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are planning eleven additional large dams on the Mekong River’s mainstream. If completed, these dams would not only destroy local ecosystems, but also reduce the fl ow of silt throughout the Mekong River system, and block major fi sh migrations, placing at risk over sixty million people who depend on the Mekong for their food security and income […]