Kaeng Sua Ten: big dam issue

10 December 1996

Why has the Kaeng Sua Ten dam project become such an emotive issue?

Partly because of the complexity of the interests involved. Local: Sa-iab villagers want to protect their homes and livelihood. Regional: residents of the Yom valley believe the dam will give them irrigation, flood control, and electricity. National: environmentalists defend the Mae Yom forests as unique and irreplaceable national assets.

More importantly because Kaeng Sua Ten is not one battle but three, and because all three touch on larger issues. At the core, Kaeng Sua Ten is part of the long-running battle between city and locality over the control of resources. On top, Kaeng Sua Ten has become a focus for conflict between officials and environmentalists over the meaning of "development". And more recently, Kaeng Sua Ten is at the centre of the struggle between established authority and popular participation. For all involved, Kaeng Sua Ten is no longer just a dam, but a symbol, an issue, a cause.

City vs Locality. Along with golf courses, waste disposal plants and eucalyptus plantations, dams are the flashpoints of the city-locality battle over resources.

For the city, dams bring benefits of electricity, water supply, flood control, and opportunities for profit from logging and construction. For the locality, dams mean displacement of people, destruction of the forest, and disruption of fish stocks.

Beyond this simple profit-loss account, dams have become powerful visual symbols of the resource battle. Every brochure on "development" has a shot of a large hydro-dam, angled to stress its sheer size, its clean swooping lines, its massed energy. But in the locality, dams are a visual intrusion. Their dull greyness violates the green-brown tones of the forest. Their sleek mass contrasts with the fine detail of nature. Their enormity disrupts the scale of the environment.

Officials vs Environmentalists. In the 1960s and 1970s, dam building was one of the major crusades of official-led development. Then the environmentalists pointed out that Thailand had lost half of its forests in a generation, partly through dam building. They joined with villagers to oppose the Nam Choan dam project which would destroy a large chunk of the largest remaining forest in mainland southeast Asia. In a long acrimonious battle, the project was shelved in 1982, revived in 1986, and then abandoned completely in 1988. In the wake of this victory, the environmental lobby managed to block four other hydro-dam projects.

The authorities changed strategy. They abandoned projects for big hydro-dams which would flood tracts of beautiful forest. They concentrated on smaller projects, with irrigation benefits for local people, located in less scenic and sensitive areas. The most important was the Pak Mun dam, sited where the main river system of the northeast flows into the Mekhong. The authorities claimed it was a "run-of-the-river" dam which would not flood forest, disrupt the river flow, or force many people to relocate.

Still there was a long and bitter battle. The environmental lobby complained that it was nonsense to label such a large structure as "run-of-the-river"; that the whole northeast river system would be affected; and that fish would never negotiate the dam’s fish ladder because "Thai fish cannot jump". But the authorities dismissed these environmental concerns. And the authorities won. Fish attracted less popular emotional support than forests. The dam was completed in 1994.

This evened the score to one-all, with the authorities on strike. In triumph, the electricity authority vaunted the "success" of the Pak Mun project and its notorious fish ladder in press and TV advertising. The irrigation department launched several new projects in the northeast. Since the Nam Choan debacle, the authorities had been nervous about proposing projects which would flood forest and destroy trees. But the Pak Mun victory gave them new confidence. They revived four shelved projects in the north. One of these was Kaeng Sua Ten.

The Kaeng Sua Ten dam was first planned in 1982 as a hydro-power project. After the Nam Choan affair, it was reborn as an irrigation scheme. During the Pak Mun struggle, the project lay on the shelf. When Bangkok and much of the country was flooded in the rainy season of 1995, supporters of the project claimed it was really a flood-control scheme. When large areas of the north and central regions were again flooded in 1996, this argument surfaced again.

In fact Kaeng Sua Ten remains an irrigation dam with the option to include some hydro power generation. If built, it will probably contribute power and water supply to new industrial areas in Phrae, as well as providing irrigation water down the Yom valley in Phichit, Phitsanulok and Nakhon Sawan. But this constant redefinition of the dam’s purpose has raised doubts. Do the authorities want to build a dam, or win another victory?

Authority vs participation. The scale of the conflict escalated at the start of the Banharn government. Several ministers swung their weight behind the dam project. And the combination of officials and ministers tried to steamroller all doubts and queries about the project.

Agriculture minister Montri Pongpanich, science minister Yingphan Manasikarn, and deputy PM Samak Sundaravej loudly backed the project. Motives were mixed and complex. Yingphan wanted the political kudos of godfathering a project which would bring irrigation benefits to his own constituency. Several other MPs in Samak’s party came from the irrigation zone. Montri’s interests were less clear. The logging value of the timber was estimated at 2 billion baht.

Like the official authorities, these political figures seemed over-ardent to have the dam built. Montri brazenly announced that the golden teak forest, which opponents claimed would be destroyed by the project, simply did not exist. Environmental journalists rushed up to Phrae to take photographs showing that Montri was lying. When NGOs demanded a public hearing, Samak opposed the idea on grounds that the dam "would never be built" if people were allowed to express their views. Yingphan called meetings in the downstream area, told the attendees that the dam would save them from flooding, and claimed the subsequent show of support was a public hearing. When even the World Bank stalled its funding because the environmental impact study was inadequate, Yingphan set up a committee staffed by the same "experts" who had made the rejected study. Army TV Channel Five made a two-part documentary on the controversy, aired the portion in support of the project, and suppressed the second part which detailed the downside.

The revival of the issue in recent weeks shows the same desire to railroad the project, and the same impatience with opposition. Banharn unblocked the project in the very dying days of his government. Official supporters are dismissive about the need for environmental studies. Samak called the project’s opponents "barbarians".

But the opposition to the dam has some added strengths. Local organisations have better information and support networks than in the past. From the experience of Pak Mun and other projects, they know that official promises of compensation need to be treated with caution. They get support from the Forum of the Poor and the network of local organisations which have emerged in recent years. They are discussing using some of the passive resistance techniques which have proved effective in other local protests.

The environment lobby has also learnt from the failure of the Pak Mun campaign. It is building its campaign around a simple issue which symbolises the arguments about sustainable development. The golden teak forest is old, extensive, and priceless as a natural laboratory of biodiversity. Why destroy something which is totally unique and irreplaceable.

The attempt to railroad the project is creating its own opposition within officialdom, among groups which question the top-down steamroller approach. The Forestry Department sponsored an environmental study which challenges the bona fides of those supporting the project. The National Parks Department is grumbling about the decision to site the dam in one of its sanctuaries. The Ministry of Interior’s Damrong Rajanupharp Institute has accused irrigation officials of doctoring information about the dam. The Office of Environmental Policy and Planning and the National Environment Board have both opposed the dam and the attempts to ignore the 1992 Environment Act.

Kaeng Sua Ten is not such a big dam. But it is a very big issue. The proposed dam is located near a geological fault line. It also lies right across three major fault-lines in society, politics and economy - locality against city, cost-benefit against sustainable development, top-down authoritarianism against participation. If it involved a simple trade-off between a certain volume of golden teak and a certain volume of irrigation and flood control, then the resolution would just involve a choice. But Kaeng Sua Ten is more difficult than that because it raises big issues about what sort of future society we want to build: equitable, sustainable and participatory. Or urban-biased, short-term and authoritarian.