Vietnam

By selecting the ‘Mekong River Basin’ from the left panel where it says 2River Basins in Focus’, detailed information will appear about the area.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is pivotal for creating demand and the conditions for widespread privatization in virtually every sector in the Asia Pacific region, from transportation, energy and urban development to agriculture, water and finance. Based on an infrastructure-led ‘growth’, the corporate sector is aggressively pushed in ADB supported projects through public-private partnerships (PPPs), loans, co-financing and another series of financial instruments.

In Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar it remains common until today that the wife will be the one who ‘owns’ the land of the paddy or upland rice fields. . Women therefore can be the ones fully responsible for maintaining those resources for the next generations.

Letter sent by the Save the Mekong Coalition, to the Mekong countries Prime Ministers demanding the immediate cancellation of the Don Sahong Dam and moratorium on decisions over other mainstream projects for the overall benefit of people throughout the Mekong region. The Don Sahong Project will irreparably damage the Khone Falls and our mother river – the Mekong.

The characteristics of natural rubber make it a competitive material for industrial and medical uses, but products related to transportation, tyres and tyre products, are by far the largest single end market for natural rubber: they account for over 50% of consumption.

Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) is one of the most controversial and destructive paper companies on the planet. The company has cleared vast areas of rainforest to feed its two million tonnes-a-year pulp mill in Sumatra, Indonesia.

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.

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.