What's at stake in China's plan to blow up islands in the Mekong

The pla beuk is a beautiful behemoth; a gigantic toothless catfish with skin smooth and silky to the touch.

It’s the largest freshwater fish in the world and, once upon a time, these fish swam the great lengths of the mighty Mekong River from southern China, through Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, all the way to the river’s delta in Vietnam.

Now, there are maybe only a few hundred adult specimens still living, hidden in isolated deep pools in a few relatively undisturbed places along the river.

If you wish to catch a glimpse of one, the best bet is to cast your eyes about the murals of the Mekong’s resorts, restaurants and riverside temples, where they’re often painted in a serene satiny blue.

A painting of a Pla Beuk at a Thai temple.
Xufanc/Wikimedia Commons

In folklore, pla beuk was once revered throughout the Mekong basin and those who sought to capture one for eating in days gone by would often perform special rituals and offerings before heading out to fish for it.

The traditional way to claim the life of a pla beuk was to go out in a wooden boat and throw a homemade spear or fibrous net laden with rocks at each corner. But now China wants to kill them another away – with bombs.

“Who would bomb a catfish?” I expect you’re asking.

China’s expanding trade routes

On May 14, the Chinese Government launched its Silk Road Project to develop trade routes across the lands of Central Asia to Europe as well as sea routes across Asian seas.

But China’s vision of Asian trade routes is not without its own bombs. The company charged with developing a trade route along the Mekong River (the state-owned Chinese Communications Construction Company) is set to dynamite river islands on a 900-kilometre section of the river that passes from the Chinese province of Yunnan through to the river port of Luang Prabang in Laos.


On the other side of the Indochinese peninsula, in the South China Sea, China is building islands, but in the Mekong it wants to demolish islands in order to make the river more navigable. Proponents talk about the process as a “river improvement project”; a “gentling-out” of the Mekong to make it smooth and easy to handle – like the pla beuk, it might be said.

This section of the river has been navigable for decades for cargo boats carrying about 60 tonnes or more. These can safely pass between the Mekong’s islands if an experienced navigator is on board.

But China is brandishing about the idea that larger boats mean more trade and more prosperity. And it plans to open up the Yunnan-to-Luang Prabang stretch of the Mekong to 500-tonne cargo barges.

This means hundreds of river islands in China, Burma, Thailand and Laos have to be blasted away.

Route to environmental decay

While not officially part of the new Silk Road, the Mekong route is still part of China’s national goal of trade route expansion. But outside of that country, environmental groups such as Save the Mekong, International Rivers, the Burma Rivers Network are questioning the economic case for the Mekong to serve as an expanded trade route.


They’re suggesting that a smoothed out Mekong would only increase trade between China and the Mekong nations by an insignificant amount. Many also suggest that the plan is mainly about China getting access to the fast-growing Southeast Asian market for Yunnan’s agricultural products.

Right now, it takes two weeks for Yunnan producers to get their goods to a Chinese seaport and another week to get them to big city markets in Indochina. The Mekong trade route is touted as being able to do all this within a few days.

Despite the bigger boats and the faster travel times, the economic impetus may be less important to China than political drivers. China will be lending money and providing credit lines – to the tune of US$10 billion – to the various Mekong nations. And it can leverage this debt to push forward with its own interests in the region.

If the river islands do get blasted away, a whole range of environmental consequences may cascade for hundreds of kilometres. The river may travel faster in parts, eroding riverside farms and conservation zones. It may also end up travelling slower in other parts; lowering water levels and changing the quantity and quality of sediment that will flow downstream.

The impact of this changing water flow on food and water security has not yet been calculated — if it ever could be — but the risks are enormous.


The Mekong, with its nutrient-rich sediment, is crucial for growing rice. It’s also home to hundreds of species of edible fish. For tens of millions of people in the Mekong basin, including millions of fisherfolk who live at near-subsistence level, fish and rice constitute their daily diet.

It may be shortsighted to gamble with this invaluable resource just to effect a slight increase in international trade figures. And this kind of threat to their livelihood recently pushed Mekong fishing communities to take to their riverboats in protest.

What’s more, business people in Burma, Laos and Thailand might look forward to increased trade between their nations but they may find themselves squeezed out of their local economy if they’re undercut by cheap goods flowing down the river from China.

Rock or an island?

Then, there’s the catfish. Those who seek to “smooth-out” the Mekong generally refer to the river islands as rocks. But these “rocks” are far from lifeless.


Many are vegetated, some with trees, and their presence in the river creates a range of pools, shoals, bars, shallows, and waterfalls, perfect for breeding countless varieties of fish, including pla beuk.

When pla beuk are young – and “ugly-cute” with prominent their whiskers – they hang around these sorts of places as they shelter from predators, feed on algae, and slowly grow. Destruction of these river islands and rocky outcrops would probably lead to the demise of juvenile fish.

At the moment, the Mekong River is known to be the most biodiverse river in the world — after the Amazon. But if the river islands are bombed away and if the riverscape is engineered into something more like a large artificial canal, then endangered species, including pla beuk, face extinction.

Alas, even if the river islands are left in peace, the fish of the Mekong face another attack from China: dams. Chinese dams have all but stopped fish migration in the upper reaches of the Mekong yet many more dams are being built every year.

If you are a fish, having your island birthplace blasted away with dynamite might seem pretty rough. But coming across a new dam is like a nuclear bomb going off.

Alan Marshall, Lecturer in Environmental Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Mahidol University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Global series: Globalisation Under Pressure

The rise in nationalism. Brexit and Trump. Reactionary far-right parties wooing millions of voters around the world. The facts on the ground are clear: globalisation – and the international economic and political system that has underpinned it for the past half-century – is fracturing.

Globalisation Under Pressure is a new series from The Conversation Global that both analyses the old international order and surfaces local stories of finance, migration, jobs, education and culture that show the far-reaching impacts of the changes underway today.

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Is China the potential driver of a new wave of globalisation?

While China has so far secured support from a number of governments for its Belt and Road Initiative, the recent forum in Beijing also highlighted some obstacles to its advancement.

Globalisation isn’t dead, it’s just shed its slick cover story

Today’s ugly politics are not a backlash against global capitalism, they’re an open embrace of the racism and greed that has always underpinned so-called global governance.

Expert conversation: ‘The right to luxury could constitute a legitimate claim’

Luxury is a global phenomenon present in all societies in various forms.

The global market for wine: China leads the emergence of a new world order

Vinyards in the Sancerre wine-growing region of France. Peter/Flickr, CC BY-SA, CC BY-SA

The latest figures on the world wine market confirm that the industry is undergoing considerable change, with European countries finding their positions and strategies challenged by the new world.

From Bulgaria to East Asia, the making of Japan’s yogurt culture

One of Japan’s biggest food trends right now is Bulgarian yoghurt. City foodsters/Kakigōri Kanna/Flickr, CC BY-ND, CC BY-ND

How a simple bacterium traveled across time and space to become Japan’s latest food fad.

The road to the great regression

War, Ford, fascism, Reaganomics, the pink tide, the EU, debt crises, rights-based activism, a fierce backlash… none of this is new. Wikimedia

We may think of current reactionary politics as radical and new, but unchecked mercantilism has always ended with a fierce backlash from both left and right. Here’s what history tells us about today.

China can help us rethink our response to deadly pandemics

The ancient Greeks were the first to use the word pandemic, but not in the modern sense of a global disease outbreak. Dedden /Wikimedia

Pandemics are global threat, but not everyone prepares for them in the same way.

Our 24/7 economy and the wealth of nations

Ever more people are stuck with shift work in a globalised economy that operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Angola’s ‘suitcase traders’ sell Brazilian trends, and dreams too

An Angolan importer buying Havaianas in the market of Brás, São Paulo, Brazil. Léa Barreau Tran, Author provided, Author provided

Brazilian soap operas are wildly popular in Portuguese-speaking Angola, influencing style and creating a business opportunity for thousands of Angolan female entrepreneurs who travel the world to bring fashion back in their luggage.

These Swedish economists foresaw the globalisation backlash

Can a 90-year-old insight into the distributive effects of free trade help us mitigate the downsides of globalisation?

Catesby Holmes, Global Commissioning Editor, The Conversation; Clea Chakraverty, Commissioning Editor, The Conversation; Fabrice Rousselot, Global Editor, The Conversation; Reema Rattan, Global Commissioning Editor, The Conversation, and Stephan Schmidt, Audience Developer, The Conversation

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africans should be afraid, very afraid

With the release of the damning report on HOW SOUTH AFRICA IS BEING STOLEN, South Africans should be afraid.  

There will be no easy way on how to rescue the state especially with the ANC in control and under the leadership of Jacob Zuma. Who would have thought that a couple of Indian brothers (Guptas) would have such influence over the African leaders? Yes, state capture is happening, and it’s the beginning of the end of democracy in this country.

One could ask if dictatorship is the order of the day and whether the coming months will see an aggressive plan on how to capture the state entirely.

One can only hope that there are some South Africans who will not be afraid to take on the Gupta-Zuma enterprise and make every effort to protect the Information Technology of the IEC from being taken over by the Gupta-Zuma establishment.   If for any reason, the Gupta-Zuma company succeed it would suggest that the ANC December elections and more importantly the 2019 General Elections will have absolutely no chance of being FREE AND FAIR.

Read this story published in South Africa Today - Damning academic report on state capture

 

Did FW De Klerk and Pik Botha have any idea that state capture would happen when they handed South Africa to terrorists on a silver plate?   Did the apartheid government plan a fair deal for ALL the people?  It was a wrong decision and has turned the economy into junk status.  After all, the majority of blacks are still living in poverty.

Perhaps it's time to set South Africa free.  Give the whites their own land, give the Indians their own land, give the Coloreds there own land and give the blacks their own land. Divide South Africa into four economic structures, and then we can track the progress.

The Gupta-Zuma company can capture the black-owned land, and Zuma can stay on as President until he dies. 

Here is the link to the report -   READ THE REPORT: How South Africa Is Being Stolen

 

AND THEN   ------- 
Schalk Naude of National Treasury says there are 40 000 Guptament employees who are directors of companies who were found on the Treasury database doing tenders with the Guptament ( RSG radio SABC )

Truth and Lies about South African History: Blacks Are Not “Indigenous” and Arrived at Same Time as Whites

The uproar in South Africa over the claims that the 1913 Land Act dispossessed blacks is a blatant lie, and forms part of four core lies about South African history, a New Observer correspondent Yochanan has written.

LIE NUMBER ONE:
There is a common belief in South Africa that the Natives Land Act of 1913 shoved blacks on reserves (‘7 percent of the land’) and ‘prohibited them from buying land in white areas’. That ‘whites forcibly removed blacks to these reserves and that these reserves were on the worst land in the country with no mineral riches and that whites kept all the best land and minerals for themselves’.
Now if I was a black man, I would probably also want to believe that myth, because it would ensure me eternal victimhood status and compensation for generations to come.

Unfortunately, it is a blatant lie and can be attributed to the lack of reading ability or legal comprehension of the journalists and historians of our time.

above: Black tribal areas, secured, not defined, by the 1913 Land Act

THE TRUTH:
First of all the biggest Platinum reserves in the world run through the former Black homeland of Bophuthatswana (North West province).

The former Nationalist government had no problem allocating this area to the Tswana tribes for self-rule—although they already had a massive country called Botswana given to them by the British. It was originally part of South Africa, called Bechuanaland.

Blacks further got another two massive countries from the British called Lesotho and Swaziland. There goes their 7 percent.

LIE NUMBER TWO:
‘Black homelands were on the worst land in South Africa’.

THE TRUTH:
When one compares the rainfall map of South Africa and anybody with elementary knowledge of South Africa will tell you that the largest part of South Africa is called the Karoo. It is a semi desert comparable to Arizona or Nevada in the USA.

Blacks never even entered this area let alone settled it. Whites made it blossom and created successful sheep farms producing meat of world quality.

Black “settlements” are found on the north and east coast of South Africa. The East Coast has a sub-tropical climate and the north a prairie-like climate with summer rainfall and thunderstorms. An exception to this is the Western Cape with a Mediterranean climate and winter rainfall.

The northern and eastern part of South Africa with its beautiful green grasslands and fertile soil is where the blacks eventually coalesced and this is the land they chose for themselves. Their eventual homelands were found on the land they inhabited out of their own free will.

The Afrikaners even have a song praising the greenness of Natal, called “Groen is die land van Natal” (Green is the land of Natal). It was perfect grazing area for the cattle herding blacks.

LIE NUMBER THREE:
‘Blacks are indigenous to South Africa and first settled it’.

THE TRUTH:
Today Blacks in South Africa often tell Afrikaners and other minorities such as the Coloureds, Indians, Chinese or Jews to adapt to their misrule and corruption or “Go Home”…implying that we, who have been born here, who hold legal citizenship through successive birthrights; should emigrate to Europe, Malaysia, India or Israel. That the only ones who have a legal claim to South Africa, all of it, are the blacks. Blacks believe that they are ‘indigenous to South Africa’—but they are not: it was proven by DNA research.

We are ALL settlers in South Africa.
All South Africans are settlers, regardless of their skin colour, and their DNA carries the proof. So says Dr Wilmot James, head of the African Genome Project, a distinguished academic, sociologist and, more recently, honorary professor of human genetics at the University of Cape Town.
Where is the archaeological proof that blacks ‘settled’ South Africa?

Apart from a few scattered archaeological remains found of black culture in the far northern Transvaal prior to 1652, it is generally agreed that blacks and whites were contemporary settlers of South Africa.

I use the term “Settler” loosely, because blacks never ‘settled’ South Africa; their presence was nomadic. Blacks were itinerants who travelled from place to place with no fixed home.

Whole capital “cities” of grass huts could be moved if grazing was exhausted. They had no demarcated areas, no fences, no borders, no maps, no title deeds to proof ownership of any land apart from a verbal claim and mutual understanding that their temporary presence in a certain area in a certain period of time constituted “ownership” of the land.

They left behind no foundations of buildings, no statues, no roads, no rock paintings, not a single proof of “settlement” of the land prior to the whites settling South Africa.

The only rock paintings were made by the Bushmen and the Hottentots (Khoi-Khoi and San) in the caves they temporarily occupied. Blacks were pastoral-nomads and the Bushmen/Hottentots were hunter-gatherer-nomads.

Whites, on the other hand, built cities, railroads, dams and a first world country comparable to the best in Europe and the new world… their legacy speaks of a people who intended to live there for a thousand years, if not eternity.

To claim that ‘the whole of Africa belongs to Blacks’ is absurd. It is like an Italian claiming the whole of Europe belongs to Italians, including Norway.

In fact, the pyramids of Egypt are proof of white settlement going back thousands of years—and also the Phoenicians settling Carthage and the Greeks settling Alexandria.

The Arabs settled North Africa soon after the Prophet Mohammed died and the whites settled Southern Africa from 1652 onwards. Today there are three Africas as Dr. Eschel Rhoodie calls it in his book “The Third Africa” (1968)… Arabic up north, Black in the centre and Whites at the south…
The white settlers of the Cape first came face to face with the Bantu around 1770 on the banks of the Great Fish River, 120 years after Van Riebeeck came to the Cape and 1000 km east of Cape Town.

LIE NUMBER FOUR:
Whites created black reserves and homelands.

THE TRUTH:
Blacks created the homelands themselves, thanks to Shaka Zulu. The common belief is that the ‘black tribes at the time were all living peacefully and in the spirit of ‘Ubuntu’ with each other in a virtual liberal paradise’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Shaka-Zulu was a genocidal maniac who wiped out some two million black people in the Defeqane ( “great scattering”).

above: The Difeqane, or “great scattering” of blacks occurred centuries after Europeans arrived in South Africa

The Zulu tyrant Shaka, at the time was committing genocide against other tribes. The Swazis and the Ndebeles fled back north in the direction of central Africa where they migrated from.

The Sothos fled into the mountains of what is today, Lesotho. The rest of the smaller tribes huddled together trying to find strength in coalescing.

That is the history of black South Africans that blacks prefer to ignore… that blacks drove other blacks off their land, not whites.

It is into this maelstrom of black chaos that the Boers trekked in 1838. As far as they went they found large open sections of country uninhabited by anyone.

Black tribes fleeing Shaka’s carnage grouped themselves into areas finding protection in concentrated numbers.

This is how Sir Theophilus Shepstone later found the remnants of black refugees huddled together on self-created reserves. He just demarcated it in order to protect them from each other.

The creators of the Bantustans were not the Boers or the whites, it was a black man called Shaka.
source:

Treasury on Denel Asia joint venture

We have noted media statements attributed to Denel in relation to the Denel Asia transaction.

National Treasury would like to place on record that Minister Malusi Gigaba held a meeting with the Denel chairperson Mr Daniel Mantshe to discuss the Denel Asia joint venture.

At the meeting, Minister Gigaba reiterated his opposition to the joint venture with VR Laser Asia given the fragile financial situation that Denel is in. The Minister further invited Denel to withdraw its litigation against National Treasury. The position of the Minister of Finance has not changed in this regard.

He remains opposed to the transaction for reasons stated elaborately in the National Treasury affidavit to court.

The matter is currently before the courts and we would like to respect the process. We will, therefore, not be making any further comment until the matter has been finalized. We hope that the other parties will also respect the court process and refrain from misleading public comments.

For media enquiries, please contact:
Mayihlome Tshwete
Cell: 072 869 2477
 SAnews.gov.za