Sustainable Development of Dams built in Mekong Delta Region

1 Duong Hoang Le ENGL 101X Position Paper 5-16-2019 The Value of Dams in Mekong River Basin and How To Make Them Sustainable Like many other Sunday mornings in the middle of autumn season in Vung Tau City, Vietnam, I stayed behind the back seat of the motorbike when my mom took me to an outdoor market. Passing by the line of people pouring in to purchase rice from the food service, I wondered why these families could not choose anywhere else to acquire the rice packages. It turned out that, from the words that my mom told me, these rice packages were delivered directly from the farmland in the Mekong Delta. In recent months, the price had gone up high that some families had to share among each other. The answer for the causes of this inflation, perhaps, come from the events happening on the river. According to the research conducted by the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystem (MLE), the Mekong is considered “the world’s 12th longest river at 4,350 km.” Excerpting from the exact scientific source, “the Mekong Basin contains the world’s largest inland fishery” for more than “40 million rural people.” However, this biodiversity system is intercepted by major human activities. Hydropower dams cause “hydrological alterations on both the Mekong mainstream and tributaries” with 9 operating ones, “11 projects under construction,” and 21 others “at various levels of planning stages” (Hecht et al., Piman et al. 724). By identifying different elements contributing to the process of building dams, this essay seeks to explore the potential of restructuring the future dams with socio-economic and environmental benefits. To provide clarification for my central argument, I will first explain the