Thailand

The lush green rice paddies, vegetable fields, forested mountains and quiet villages in the Wangsaphung district of the Loei province of North-Eastern Thailand could be an oasis of rural tranquility, with clean air to breathe, fresh vegetables and fruit to eat and spring water to drink.

Hydropower is often portrayed as “clean” or “green” energy and as part of the solution for preventing fossil fuel-related climate change. However, government-sponsored and corporate-promoted hydropower implies building huge dams that result in environmental destruction and widespread violation of human rights, ranging from loss of livelihoods to forced evictions and related cases of repression.

PRESS RELEASE. In a bold outpouring of public concern for Southeast Asia’s Mekong River, more than 15,000 people from within the six-country Mekong region and around the world have signed a “Save the Mekong” petition urging governments to abandon plans for hydropower development along the river’s mainstream. The petition – written in seven languages - will be hand-delivered to Thailand’s Prime Minister H.E.

The Mekong River is one of the world’s major rivers and flows along 4,350 km (2,703 miles) draining an area of 795,000 km2. (1) As Aviva Imhof from IRN beautifully describes it, “the Mekong River is a changing kaleidoscope of cultures, geography and plant and animal life. From a small trickle in Tibet, the river quickly gathers steam and carves magnificent gorges through Yunnan Province of China.

Before the current global economic meltdown, the pulp industry had ambitious expansion plans. Although the industry was closing mills in the North, it was expanding dramatically in the South where about five million tons of new capacity was due to start up each year for the next five years. Vast areas of monoculture tree plantations have been established to feed raw material to huge new megamills, particularly in Latin America, southeast Asia and South Africa.

By Chris Lang

Eucalyptus, oil palm, rubber and jatropha monoculture plantations are expanding onto local communities’ lands and forests in the Mekong region’s countries. Promoted under the guise of development, poverty alleviation and even climate change mitigation, such plantations are resulting in severe social and environmental impacts.

The inter-meshing of the six economies in the Mekong Basin since the 1990s has been fostered under the Greater Mekong Sub-region economic cooperation programme. This was aimed at increasing the flow of cross-border investment from countries with considerable economic might such as China, Thailand and Vietnam into neighbouring countries such as Laos PDR and Cambodia, which have a ‘doors wide open’ approach calling for foreign companies to come to invest.

Rubber is one part of life of the people of the South, related both to the culture and economy of the last 108 years. The monoculture production system has replaced a traditional system of rubber forests, where rubber used to be grown in amongst fruit orchards and natural forests known as a suan somrom or “integrated garden”. Rubber plantations have been promoted through the government’s Welfare Fund for Rubber Plantations.

Thailand is making big plans, in particular for the next ten years, to boost agrofuel production particularly through expansion of oil palm plantations. However, the plans are not going anywhere yet due to the price volatility of agrofuel feedstock like palm oil and sugar as well as growing environmental concerns. Thailand has two types of agrofuels: gasohol (mixture of gasoline and ethanol) and biodiesel. Gasohol made by mixing gasoline with 10% ethanol is called E10 (Gonsalves 2006).

WRM information sheets on GE tree research First posted: 18 August 2008 Last update: August 2014 Forest tree species being manipulated: rubber tree (1) Aim of genetic manipulation

By Ms Sayamol Kaiyoorawong and Ms Bandita Yangdee - Project for Ecological Awareness Building