The Mekong River flows through the heart of ASEAN, an association of Southeast Asian countries that counts more than 1.5 billion people as a whole: China, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Mekong is the twelfth longest river in the world, second only to the Amazon in terms of biodiversity: in its waters live more than 1,200 species of fish.
According to the FAO, the lower Mekong basin is the most productive freshwater fishing region in the world, accounting for about 15 per cent of the world’s catch; between fishing and aquaculture, the annual production is estimated at about 4.5 million tons of fish and other aquatic organisms. These figures don’t include the artisanal fishing, which is the essential source of livelihood for millions of people.
Today, however, the nets are empty, the fishermen are desperate, and entire rural villages are on the brink of ruin. Seasonal agriculture is also in crisis: usually, when the flood recedes, millions of inhabitants on its shores cultivate vegetables and rice on the land fertilized by silt, but today it is not arriving anymore. The river level is so low that even the pumps for irrigating the fields don’t reach the water.
For sure, this is caused by climate change, which leads to a decreased amount of rain during the monsoon season and makes the atmospheric events irregular, violent and sudden. But the human interventions along the river’s course should not be underestimated: the extraction of sand for the building industry, the removal of islands, islets, and sandbars to facilitate navigation, as well as the construction of dams, alter the normal flow of the water, the alternation of dry periods and floods, and affect the migration of fish.
There is also another cause of serious damage to the environment in these areas. Since traditional cultivation along the river has become difficult, due to the lack of water and the fertile substances it normally deposits, local farmers have started to plant cassava, deforesting large areas around the Mekong. Cassava grows easily even in lack of water, but after a few years it dries up the land, leading the farmers to deforest more land, in an endless vicious circle.
Immoderate agricultural expansion, legal and illegal forest use, and the construction of roads, dams and other infrastructure are currently devastating much of the forest. The result is an extreme reduction of biodiversity and the destruction of habitats for the animal populations living in the region.
One thing is for sure: if this ruinous trend is not somehow interrupted, the Mekong system will soon implode with catastrophic consequences, both in terms of loss of biodiversity and unique natural environments and on a social level, forcing millions of people to leave in search of new sources of livelihood.
