The Mekong Part II: How Dams May Damage Children’s Health
Ian G. Baird, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on dams in Southeast Asia, tells of meeting a farmer and his five-year-old son from a village in rural Laos in 2009.
The two were sitting in a canoe as the sun rose over the Mekong, Baird wrote in 2011.
The farmer removed a carp from his net and tossed it into a bamboo basket that his son was holding.
The farmer had caught four fish, not as many as when fishing with his father when he was a child, but more than enough to feed his family of seven.
“We’re not sure if my son’s children will be able to go fishing in the future,” the farmer said. “The dams planned for the Mekong River scare us.”
Baird noted that this father-and-son scene could easily be replicated hundreds of thousands of times in rural villages situated along the Mekong and its tributaries.
Dan Southerland
