THE MEKONG -- Fathers and sons: How fisheries can fade

Fathers and sons

How fisheries can fade

| 3 of 5 essays

CHANG NAA stands up on the prow of his narrow wooden canoe and casts a small net into the water under the watchful eyes of his son Chang Thung, a four-year-old as solid and sombre as his father is lithe and placid. Beneath the canoe’s tattered fabric roof his wife stirs a pot of samlaa macchu, a sour soup. Before serving it she rinses the dishes in the murky water.

The Tonle Sap river is a two-way tributary which joins the Mekong about 800km downriver from Xayaburi, at Phnom Penh. In drier seasons it drains South-East Asia’s biggest freshwater lake, also called the Tonle Sap, into the Mekong; during the monsoon it flows the other way, bringing water and sediment from the Mekong to the lake. Mr Chang Naa and his family live in one of the river’s floating villages. He is 33 years old; he has been fishing the Tonle Sap for 15 years. His father fishes these same waters. In time, says Mr Chang Naa, so will Chang Thung: “With us, what the father does, the son will also do.”

Mainly he catches what he calls chkok and onpun—small, silvery fish. Some are destined for his wife’s soup pot. The rest—he catches between two and three kilos per day—he sells for prahok and tuk trey, a chunky paste and clear brown liquid both made from salted, fermented fish. Some fishermen supplement their meagre income with rice farming, but Mr Chang Naa and his family own no land. Like most people he knows, he is working off a perpetual debt incurred by money borrowed at extortionate rates for food, fuel and equipment. A fisherman from a village near Mr Chang Naa’s says he spends four or five months a year paying off local moneylenders.

The Tonle Sap lake yields around 300,000 tonnes of fish a year, accounting for most of Cambodia’s freshwater catch. In all, the MRC estimates that the Mekong yields around 2.6m tonnes of wild fish each year, worth at least $2 billion in dockside sales. Add in secondary industries such as fish processing, markets, fuel and equipment sales and boat building, and the total value of the Mekong’s fisheries is between $5.6 billion and $9.4 billion.

Small-scale fishing predominates along the Mekong—most boats in Cambodia weigh less than five tonnes and use engines with less than ten horsepower. Mr Chang Naa’s livelihood is not that different from his father’s or the vast majority of his peers. But that is starting to change with the rise in aquaculture. Production in the fish farms of Vietnam’s delta is now larger than that from its other freshwater and seawater fisheries combined. Prices for wild-caught fish are rising—Khai Ratana, who fishes a little way upriver from Mr Chang Naa, says he gets 12,000 riel ($3) per kilo, up from 3,000 riel five years ago—but that is because they have grown scarcer in recent years.

At this point in the river’s descent to the sea, its potential as a power generator has been used up. The lowest lying of the dams under discussion, Cambodia’s dam at Sambor, lies around 300km upriver. Cambodia’s fisheries thus illustrate the fundamental political tension at the heart of the region’s development: upstream economies overwhelmingly reap the benefits of changes to the river’s regime, while those downstream bear the cost.

This is the way with all rivers, but all the more so with the Mekong, because the geographical hierarchy reflects the geopolitical one. China, the most powerful nation, has the high ground and the most hydropower potential. It is also least dependent on the river’s water for other purposes (though it has plans to divert some of it away to its thirsty east anyway), the least susceptible to civil-society pressure and the least interested in binding itself to an international order.

This worries everyone downstream. China and Thailand have long enjoyed good relations, and China has bought goodwill in Laos and Cambodia with massive infrastructure investments. But Myanmar has opened up to the West in the past five years in part to counterbalance Chinese influence. Vietnam fears its powerful northern neighbour—China invaded as recently as 1979, and the two countries contest territory in the South China Sea—and anti-China sentiment has been rising in Laos. As China has grown more regionally assertive, Laos and Vietnam have sought to deepen their relations with America. Yet that will probably do very little to dissuade China from building more dams, any more than the objections of Laos’s vastly richer and more populous neighbour Vietnam deterred it from building its dam at Xayaburi. 

These tensions will be kept in check by the general desire for a commodity quite as valuable as water: peace. For a long time it was in short supply, with decades of war, political division and the spiralling horrors of the Khmers Rouges perversely protecting the Mekong from exploitation. Nobody wanted to put up the capital for a dam that would be bombed, nationalised or left to rack and ruin. Those days are over; none would wish them back. The problem is managing equitably, and without permanent environmental degradation, the prosperity peace brings. 

A hundred kilometres or so south-east of Mr Chang Naa’s fishing grounds, tourists in Phnom Penh sip mojitos in front of cafés as an endless parade of late-model sedans and smoke-spitting tuk-tuks jostles for space along Sisowath Quay. It is Cambodia’s one big, bustling city, with a sleazy edge to its tattered colonial elegance. Away from the river tens of thousands live in crowded slums—mainly rural Cambodians yearning for a bit of urban prosperity. Chang Naa expects his son, Chang Thung, to fish in his footsteps; he may want it so. But like all sons Chang Thung will step into a different river—or perhaps, in this case, onto a different shore. Phnom Penh was a city of just 189,000 in 1980. It could be home to 2.5m by 2030, and Chang Thung may choose to be one of them. His choice may be a free one. People in backwaters, both figurative and literal, choose cities all the time. But it may not be. By the time he reaches working age, the fears of dam sceptics may have been realised. There may be no more fish for him to catch.