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Mekong River Basin

Page history last edited by Maya Rajasekharan 14 years, 9 months ago

DSC01257tonlesap1River Mekong at Khong Chiam3AngkorWat 069can tho market_clipAngkor Wat, CambodiaNear Pak Mun Dam, Thailand More Photos...

The Mekong River Basin includes parts of China, Myanmar and Viet Nam, nearly one third of Thailand and most of Cambodia and Lao PDR. Population growth, along with renewed political stability after decades of conflict, has accelerated resource exploitation in the Mekong river basin. Although some stretches remain relatively untouched by human activity, the river is an economic lifeline for 60 million people.

 

The heavy reliance of the Mekong basin’s inhabitants on the river, especially for agriculture and fisheries, presents a number of complex, interrelated issues for transboundary governance and sustainable development. In the lower basin, which cuts through four countries, 70 percent of the inhabitants are subsistence farmers. Traditional rice cultivation goes hand in hand with fishing and the gathering of forest products.

The growing need for integrated basin management—to address food insecurity, rural poverty, environmental degradation, threats to biodiversity, and tensions among multiple users—makes the river basin a good choice for the Challenge Program on Water and Food. The lead role of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which represents four of the basin’s riparian countries, is facilitating this process.Stakeholders from the Mekong River's riparian states identified several research objectives. 

 

Research objectives:

 

·         Establishing the value—social, environmental and economic—of water and land resources in the Mekong river basin 

·         Identifying the current status, trends and drivers of land and water resource use 

·         Improving livelihoods in the context of uncertainty caused by climate variability, restricted resources bases, limited access to information and 

·         poor infrastructure 

·         Addressing the social, economic and environmental consequences of different water and land resource use systems 

·         Improving land and water governance

 

The Mekong Basin Focal Project produced valuable insights about the specific nature of the food and water crisis at basin scale. Some of their key findings are; 

  1. Poverty is decreasing in the Mekong basin, but the poorest households are not sharing the improvements. 
  2. Livelihood activities are closely linked with water. Majority of villagers in water poor areas engage in crop farming, fishing or shrimp production in which water is considered as important element that constitute a good quality of life.

  3. Fish ponds excavated in the rice paddies and supplied by water and fish naturally during the rainy season, provide a valuable and reliable source of nutrition and cash for farmers.

  4. The main issue in the Mekong basin is not water availability (except seasonally in the certain areas such as northeast Thailand) but the impact of changed flows on ecology, fish production, access to water and food security. Changes in the natural flow regime may alter the environment of fisheries in the Tonle Sap and elsewhere. Altered low flows may impact salinity intrusion in the delta, thus altering the balance of rice and shrimp production, whcih in turn may affect food security and incomes. 

  5. The impact of climate change, dam and irrigation development on water availability or flow is not great. The real issue, however, is the extent to which changes in flow will affect food production, the environment, floods and salinity intrusion in the delta.

  6. Yield of rice, the dominant crop, varies from 1.0 to 5.0 ton/ha with the highest yield in the Delta region of Vietnam. The yield is lowest in the north-east Thailand. However, in general, yield has increased over the years and there appears to be scope for continuing increase.

  7. The current rate of increase of both production and productivity of rice is considerably greater than is required to feed the expected extra population to 2050, suggesting that producing the food may not be the main challenge. Policies and institutions for distribution, and ensuring that the development is sustainable and has low environmental impact, will presumably be the main challenges.

  8. The value of fisheries in the Lower Mekong is, even if the unreliable lower catch-based estimates are used, at least as important as that of livestock. The consumption based estimates lead to estimates of the value of fisheries as considerably greater than that of livestock.

  9. Political choices will govern the future development of the Mekong- it is not primarily limited by physical constraints such as cropland productivity and water availability.

  10. Individual sub-catchments can be significantly affected by changes in irrigation, deforestation, climate change, and dam development. Of these possible drivers of hydrological change, none is clearly more significant than the others. However, some are more amenable to change, and the policy decisions that affect them operate at different scales.

  11. Tonle Sap Lake and similar ecosystems are more likely to be affected by subtle changes in the inflow and outflow rates into the lake, and the consequent impact on fisheries, rather than by gross changes in volume or surface area due to climate change, increased irrigation, dam development, or deforestation.

  12. The role of the inflows and outflows in affecting fisheries in Tonle Sap and similar lakes and wetlands should be priority area of study.

 

The Integreated Database Information System [IDIS] Basin Kits provide baseline data layers (vector and grid) for the Mekong Basin covering various domains such as climate, agriculture, soil, land use, topography, etc.

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