วันศุกร์ที่ 13 กันยายน พ.ศ. 2556

Killing the Mekong





           This documentary is about the resistance of people from building Xayaburi Dam, that will produce hydropower and 95 % of power will sell to Thailand, in Northern Laos in Mekong River.
The documentary aims to raise issues about the impacts of dam if it’s built ahead. Since millions of people depend on Mekong River for their lively hood, if the Xayaburi is built, there will be a lot of damage to Biodiversity, such as fish, herb, and other kind of animals in Mekong River. It’s will also lead to environmental degradation, such as drought and flood. The dam will harm people life. So this documentary collects of different point of views of scholars and local people to raise awareness of impacts of dam and to stop building Xayaburi Dam.
        As we can see from this video, development is not always good. People who are skilled full can grab the opportunity and advantages from development but unskillful people can be harmed. If Xayaburi Dam is built ahead, the benefits of Dam will go to big companies and the impacts of dam will then destroy local people life. People will be relocated.
        From the documentary, we can also see the resistance of local people fight for their life. They are fighting with the power of cooperation. Local people, powerless people, will never be involved in decision making since the cooperation can own the state.
         In short to comment about this video or about Xayaburi Dam, I would say it shouldn’t be built along Mekong River. It will destroy a lot of people life, not only in Laos, countries along Mekong River will be affected. We have to think that sometimes development can lead to uneven development.  

Name: Nang Aye Aye Myint
ID: 540415505
 

3 ความคิดเห็น:

  1. In the name of national development, governments allow building dams in ecologically the most productive rivers for energy to boost the economy in order to relieve people from poverty. However, the intention for helping the poor is questionable because many cases have shown that those kinds of development projects are taking place at the expense of the poor whom the governments name to help. The energy and profit generated from the expense of the local poor is not going to use for them. The energy will be sold out to richer countries and the money will be gone to the officials and spent for other things and another place, not for the local people.

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  2. Who have the right to access to the natural resources? In this case the right to access natural resources of local people is extracted by the big companies; specifically four Thai Banks. As they mention in the documentary movie, the Thai banks will make a handsome profit from the project while the local have to suffer from the consequences such as flood, fish shortage, and loosing land for cultivation.
    In my opinion, building dam is not a big problem. There are some advantages of a dam too. Producing hydro power, sustaining the fresh water volume, rising the ground water level are the good point of having a dam. However, the benefits from this giant dam goes to small amount of people, the investors, not to the huge amount of people living in the region. This is the main trigger of uneven development and mechanism for poverty.

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  3. I agree with Hleng Kham in the sense that building dam has many advantages. It is true that some people suffer from building, but what is important here is the necessity of minimizing harm. But people are just very greedy and they only care about profit. In addition, every government is obsessed with the idea of modernity, in the form of industrialization and urbanization. So what they do is exploitation: rich countries exploit poor and poor countries exploit on the natural environment. Every government is now talking about 'world peace' and 'equality' but they don't even have ethic/caring in the reality. (Just my insight)

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