The EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), more commonly referred to as the EU’s “disastrous fishing policy“, the EU’s “most discredited and unpopular policy“ or simply “the worst EU policy“, is without a doubt one of most maligned pieces of EU legislation.

With a referendum on the UK’s EU membership on the horizon, it is important to take a step back and consider whether the CFP has helped or hurt UK fisheries.

While ecosystems are certainly complex, the mechanics of sustainable fisheries are well understood.

As fish populations have been depleted and are producing fewer offspring, efforts to reduce fishing pressure would rebuild fish stocks and lead to larger harvests in the future.

It’s a key tenet of fisheries economics but it still surprises many people that sustainable management would mean higher, not lower, catches than we are currently achieving. This higher volume of catches would bring both economic and social benefits.

Fishing quotas are leading to stock recovery

This key principle of reducing fishing pressure to achieve fish stock recovery is finally being implemented in EU waters. As in most fisheries in the developed world, one of the key mechanisms for preventing overfishing is the use of fishing quota – a limit on the amount of a particular fish stock that can be caught.

Quota management in the EU began for the majority of commercial fish stocks with the first CFP implemented in 1983, a time when fish stocks were at low levels and fishing pressure was still high.

Gradually fishing pressure has decreased for quota species and some fish stocks are now growing. In contrast, EU fish stocks that do not fall under quota management (e.g. fish stocks in Mediterranean waters or sea bass in the Northeast Atlantic) have not seen fishing pressure decline over this time.

If we had acted sooner to reduce fishing pressure, we could already be harvesting higher yields and supporting coastal communities. Unfortunately, quota proposals to rebuild fish stocks have been resisted by some sectors within the fishing industry as “absolutely diabolical“ and “catastrophic for the industry“.

Now that some stocks have been rebuilt and quotas are increasing, the same voices conclude that agreed fishing quotas “get the balance right“.

It is also worth noting that even now, when stocks are being rebuilt, the UK industry’s gross profit margin has increased from a healthy 15% in 2008 to 35% in 2014 and now stands at €367 million, the highest in the EU. For the UK fishing industry, EU management seems to be delivering benefits despite protests coming from the UK itself.

Flawed negotiations are still better than no negotiations

As this industry lobbying is taking place, the Council of Ministers (formed by the fisheries Ministers from EU member states) enters closed-door negotiations each year with scientific advice on recommended fishing limits in hand but leave the negotiations with quotas often set above advice – by an average of 20% over the last 15 years.

The UK is actually one on the parties walking away from negotiations with the most quota set above advice (ranking second out of fifteen member states).

On the face of it, negotiations which continuously exceed scientific advice seem to provide strong evidence for the failure of EU fisheries management. However, even these flawed negotiations are better than no negotiations, which is sometimes exactly what happens when negotiations breakdown with non-EU countries like Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Russia.

Under the threat of non-EU countries leaving the negotiation table, quotas set for fish stocks shared with non-EU countries are set higher than scientific advice by a greater amount than those stocks that only involve EU members (24% vs. 19%) from 2001 to 2015. Some of these negotiations have reached such levels of discord between the parties that they have been nicknamed the “mackerel war“, the “herring war“, and the “cod wars I and II“.

It shouldn’t be surprising that this form of loose arrangement would lead to a non-cooperative outcome when dealing with a shared resource, as economic theory predicts. The danger is that as a result of the proximity of the UK to EU members, leaving the EU would imply negotiating every single UK quota with the EU.

The UK citizen campaign to end discards has had an EU-wide impact

One of the more widely publicised criticisms of EU fisheries management is the practice of discarding fish that are undersized, unwanted or over quota. Now the EU is putting a discard ban – ‘the landing obligation’ – in place.

It is a complicated policy and is being phased in to ensure it is workable. Still, it is clear that the integrity of any quota system depends on measuring what is taken out of the water, as is the case in Norway, Iceland and elsewhere, rather than just what is landed.

The push to ban discarding came largely through a UK public campaign but having an EU-wide impact will ultimately benefit the UK, as EU countries discarding fewer fish will aid fish stock recovery.

There’s a good reason for non-British boats in our waters

You may have read that foreign countries are in our waters and catching all the British fish. While the whole concept of ‘British fish’ is nonsensical to begin with, it’s worth exploring how quota is allocated between countries in the EU.

The allocation of quota between EU member states is largely determined by historic catch shares – the ‘relative stability’ – of member states over a reference period (1973-78) just before the CFP was brought into force.

Under this method, countries fishing in each other’s waters during the reference period continue to have the right to do so. Using a reference period is at least as reasonable as any alternative method of determining national shares and is also applied when setting quotas with countries outside of the EU.

In addition to this, the proposal to ban foreign vessels as some have advocated is likely to be incompatible with international law as many fishing rights stretch as far back as the Middle Ages. Calls for such a ban also don’t acknowledge that British boats also operate in other nations’ waters regularly to fish, sell at foreign ports and undergo vessel repairs. The UK fishing industry itself opposes such a ban.

Which fishing vessels receive quota is a national decision

Many ports around the UK only have a small fraction of the vessels they once had, but blaming the EU here doesn’t make much sense.

• First, technological changes have led to a reduction in the number of fishing vessels in developed countries both inside and outside the EU.
• Second, vessel decommissioning schemes from the EU actually helped many fishers and coastal communities through a difficult transition as quotas lessened.
• Third, one of the most significant issues for small ports is how quota is allocated between different fishing fleets and this is a national decision.

Consider the controversial Cornelis Vrolijk, a Dutch-owned 114-metre vessel that holds 23% of total English fishing quota. While the quota concentration is shocking, it is not a result of EU management; the vessel is deemed English under UK law and any quota assigned and requirement to land a certain share of fish in the UK is therefore set by the UK government itself.

As small ports disappear and profits for the small-scale fleet decline despite large increases for the rest of the industry, all major parties in the last UK election promised to ensure more quota for low-impact and small-scale fishing. Here, the CFP may help to ensure that this promise is implemented.

While not stipulating what specific criteria are used, Article 17 of the CFP stipulates that quota should be allocated according to “transparent and objective criteria”. Greenpeace is currently taking the UK government to court for failing to implement this article which could bring tremendous economic and social benefits if implemented.

Avoiding the mistakes of individual actors exploiting common resources

Fisheries in the EU under the CFP are far from perfect and should continue to be critiqued and improved. With that said, the UK managing fisheries would likely be worse for stock recovery, worse for following scientific advice, worse for implementing UK initiatives, and worse for the many UK vessels that move anywhere near our neighbours.

Just as the history of fisheries around the world illustrates that what happens when each fisher is looking after their own interests is that a shared resource suffers, so too is the case with individual countries looking after their own interests while sharing fish stocks.

The evidence bears this out: EU cooperation through the Common Fisheries Policy is benefitting UK fisheries.

Griffin Carpenter is an economic modeller at the New Economics Foundation. His research focuses on the environmental, social and economic impacts of transitioning to sustainable management of natural resources. Griffin has contributed to projects on the bio-economic modeling of EU fisheries, climate change and energy policy, generating indicators to evaluate policy success, and true cost accounting using environmentally-extended input-output modelling. Griffin received a PPE degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Masters degree in Environmental Policy from the London School of Economics.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Not only was December 2015 the UK’s wettest month on record, but it was also exceptionally stormy. Bad news for many, but great news for the country’s wind power and hydro generators.

In fact, storms Desmond, Eva and Frank meant that throughout December, more than 19% of Great Britain’s (not the UK’s – as Northern Ireland is not included in the underlying data) electrical energy came from wind, solar and hydro combined.

That’s the highest ever figure for a calendar month. It was an exceptional end to an unusual year that saw several new records set within Britain’s power sector as the transition from dirty to clean energy continued.

Here are a few of the most notable outcomes.

Record breaking renewables

Wind, solar and hydro – the weather-dependent renewables – together generated 14.6% of Great Britain’s electrical energy in 2015, the highest ever annual amount. Wind stormed (literally) past the 2014 record to break through the 10% milestone. Solar more than doubled to 2.5%.

The weather-dependent renewables of wind, solar and hydro peaked at 22% of Britain’s electrical energy generation over the week of Christmas (the grey line in week 52 on Chart 2) – another record.

June saw the highest ever daily percentage of solar generation, peaking on Sunday 7th June at 8.9% – another new record. (see Chart 1)

The previous day, 6th June, was both sunny and windy, which meant at 2pm solar, wind and hydro were generating more than 40% of British electricity. Coal may also have dropped to a record low at the same point.

Greatest-ever fuel diversity

Natural gas generated more than a quarter of Britain’s electricity throughout 2015. It was enough to return gas to top spot, but still far below its 46% peak six years ago. Coal continued its decline. (See Chart 3)

As recently as 1990, Britain still relied on coal to generate more than 70% of its electricity (Chart 4). But things have changed a great deal since then as natural gas and more recently renewables have provided more options.

British energy is now more diversified than ever. In fact, averaged over 2015, no individual fuel source provided more than 30% of the electricity generated – the first time this has ever happened.

Power sector emissions lowest for decades

More renewables and less coal means that when the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change release their greenhouse gas emissions statistics for the power sector this March, 2015 will be the lowest value recorded since 1990.

A rough estimate (using this data) puts the emissions somewhere between 105 and 110 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. This is at least a 45% reduction from the power sector since 1990 – the country is making significant progress towards decarbonisation.

Where next? It’s very possible that 2016 will see coal generation drop below nuclear for the very first time since Britain’s (and the world’s) first nuclear plant came online 60 years ago.

Grant Wilson is Research Associate, Environmental and Energy Engineering Research Group, Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Sheffield.

Data sources: The underlying data of the differing fuel types and imports/exports is available from Elexon and National Grid websites for each half hourly period of the year. This analysis adds these values together to provide a total for each period. The percentages presented here are then calculated using this total, and it is likely that these can slightly differ from other analyses (including that of DECC) due to a different methodology or by using different estimates of embedded wind or solar generation.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Consider this: can we “save the planet?”

That’s a critical question if you’re an environmentalist – though it requires an understanding of what ‘saving’ and ‘the planet’ means. And if those founding definitions are not based upon realistic information, what would be the result?

Beyond the clear failure of the COP21 Paris Conference to deliver a binding climate agreement, capable of stopping dangerous climate change, I believe that the environmental movement has its own policy questions to answer.

The ideas explored in this article may leave certain readers aggrieved by what I write. In the end though, the most important critic is the evidence – and today the evidence of ecological harm is at odds with many popular environmental messages.

Environmental consciousness is bound within human identity

Ever since early monotheistic religions disentangled human well-being from the ecological systems which supported them, we’ve been on a downward spiral of environmental destruction and exploitation – which has lead us, inevitably, to today’s Anthropocene epoch.

The ‘new religion’ of neoliberal economics, wholly divorced from the material restrictions on the pursuit of growth, has accelerated the deleterious trends of that earlier theological separation.

The ‘Western’ environment movement, distinct from the movements of indigenous peoples with their innate bond to natural systems, began with a rejection of the apparently ‘false wealth’ of the 1960s consumer boom.

In the eco-political swell of the 1990s, when green politics took power and campaign groups slowly began to take corporate funding, that strong philosophical counter-argument to materialism faltered. So-called ‘hair shirt’ environmentalists, who continued to argue against ‘consumption’ in the wake of this change, were marginalised within many campaign groups.

In the neo-liberal world, political success required an engagement with capitalism in order to deliver sustainability goals; but even left-wing socialists now dismiss the the idea of ecological limits as ‘collapse porn’.

Unless we embrace the evidence, what we do is PR

In the affluent world’s media, messages which advocate a deeper connection of humans to the ‘living Earth’ are often caricatured – evoking idealistic metaphors for the developed world’s spiritual dead-end which are ultimately subverted by their associated marketing message.

Ecological idealism is ridiculed – willingly consigned to the scrapheap by consumer choice.

Yet in the wake of COP21, any proposal that environmentalism can work within the economic and political status quo has abjectly failed also.

From fields as diverse as agriculture, climate and marketing, to resource depletion, ecological limits and eco-psychology – the evidence on human impacts, and how to tackle them, is increasingly at odds with popular environmental messages.

Promoting that evidence isn’t being ‘negative’, or ‘doomerish’, or holding an ‘outdated prejudice’. Evidence exists as it is – it is how we react to it which defines whether our advocacy is factually-based or, for want of a better description, self-deluding.

‘Green’ is the colour of money

Capitalism did not engage with environmentalism in order to deliver realistic change. It engaged with the environmental message in order to own and subvert it to a more profitable end.

Don’t agree with that statement? The VW diesel emissions scandal is the perfect example of how that whole model of consumer-driven change has failed – leaving the consumer feeling defrauded of their good intentions.

Another, less publicized example is biofuels.

During the 1990s road protests in Britain the environment movement developed a detailed factual critique of the economic and environmental consequences of car-based transport. In the 2000s campaign groups traded that analysis for the more lucrative narrative of biofuels – which ultimate foundered a decade later when its true impacts were revealed.

For mainstream campaign groups, dependent on trying to secure members, promoting a message of alternative consumption, rather than prohibition and significant lifestyle change, is more conducive to recruiting support. But how far can you go down that route before you lose sight of your original objectives?

Right now I know of a number of people working for campaign groups, talented in their field of ecological expertise, who are focussed on membership or recruitment campaigns rather than doing the primary job of pressuring for change.

If supporting the operation of the organisation, rather than its core campaign, becomes its reason d’etre for existence, then what are these campaign groups for?

Foreseeable dead-ends subvert ecological change

I came across the issue of climate change as a scientific debate in the mid-1980s. Then in 1988 the UN set up the IPCC to study the issue further; and scientists like James Hansen began to tell policy-makers about the severity of the issue.

The IPCC’s first assessment came out in 1990. Then in 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed at the Rio ‘Earth Summit’

Then… not a lot happened.

The whole process has been chasing its tail ever since.

One stark message to come out of COP21 was the extent to which, on the debate over ecological decline, the movement censors itself. If they were to “speak truth to power” they would no longer be welcome in the room.

Major aspects of climate policy, such as emissions trading, have been shown to contribute a negligible amount to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And yet many within environmentalism cling to such ideas in order to deliver change without threatening ‘business as usual’.

The climate battle is lost without a critique of economic growth. Look at this graph – (above right). It shows the US Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center’s (CDIAC) estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – from 1751 until (on provisional data) 2012.

Over 261 years of industrial and technical development, under CDIAC’s dataset, humanity has generated 383 billion tonnes of carbon emissions from fossil fuels (note, ‘carbon’ – the weight of carbon dioxide is 3.667 times greater).

The emissions of carbon since we decided this was a global problem in 1992 have been 152 billion tonnes.

In other words, over 261 years of historic emissions, we’ve emitted 40% of the total in the 20 years since the world decided we had to tackle this urgent problem. In 20 years annual emission rates have risen almost 60%.

Why the large change, even though technological efficiency has been increasing over this time? Economic growth.

It is not simply ‘consumption’ which is the issue, or what form that consumption takes. Any measure of growth in the human system, for simple reasons of thermodynamic reality, will create a change in material consumption – and thus the energy required to enable that activity to take place.

The reason the UNFCCC process has stalled isn’t simply that climate deniers have befuddled policy-makers. The entire economic process is based upon a myth of growth, and an existential terror that without growth human society as we know it would collapse.

Green technology can’t displace the ‘service’ of fossil fuels

OK – if fossil fuels are a problem, let’s switch to renewable energy.

This is reason why the green technology/green consumer argument is so seductive in policy-making fields. It allows a theoretical change in damaging impacts without changing society’s dependence upon material consumption and growth.

Problem is that whole argument – like VW’s engine management system – is another deception. Not least because while the energy produced might be physically equivalent, irrespective of price the comparative investment returns of these processes are lower than conventional fossil fuels.

Many environmental groups, in their efforts to lobby politicians, love these simple solutions too.

Unfortunately most of their plans for change – for example CAT’s Zero Carbon Britain – while they may be balanced in terms of their energy calculations, do not take account of the resource limitations of making them happen. Not simply the resources required to build the energy infrastructure, but also the additional resources involved in society utilising that energy.

Right now there is a growing concern amongst academics and industry figures that the specialised resources required to build ‘green technologies’ on a large scale might not exist. Even conventional resources, such as copper, have their own unique limitations. And while in most cases there are substitutes available, they often have their own limitations or prohibitions on use.

For example, the large, direct-drive wind turbines which are the core of expanding wind power are reliant on the use of rare earth metals such as neodymium and samarium. These metals have a limited supply – which limits the roll-out of wind power well below the theoretical wind resource available. What’s more the production of those metals is having a severe, toxic impact upon the environment and indigenous communities.

On-line environmental activism: a dissonant practice?

One of the largest shifts in environmental activism in recent years has been in the area of on-line activism.

Question is – quite apart from the practical issue of whether such action can create real change, or be manipulated to detract from it – has on-line action become part of the ecological problem?

There is a growing cognitive disconnect between what ‘clicktivism’ can achieve versus its environmental impacts.

When you buy a new laptop or smart-phone, roughly 90% of the ecological footprint of that device has already been expended through the production and supply chain. For example, just to make the memory chip of a laptop takes more energy than the device will consume over its average service life with the user.

The ecological footprint of the Internet, which has become essential to the use of many technologies, now exceeds the footprint of that other icon of green angst, global air travel. That trend in consumption has been exacerbated by the recent shift towards ‘the cloud’.

There are many practical ways to address the issue of impacts of IT. The industry could make devices which last many years, drastically cutting their life-cycle ecological footprint. That, however, is not on the agenda because it would entail a significant contraction in, and loss of revenue from the whole tech sector.

Climate change is not ‘the worst’ of all ecological evils

It is not simply that the mainstream of the environment movement fails to call for ‘degrowth’. From my own experience, they are vehemently opposed to espousing any line which directly challenges the the political fetish of growth.

Unfortunately the often-used substitute, that ‘less is more’, fails not only on thermodynamic grounds, but also because it disregards the material differences between ‘quantity’ and ‘footprint’.

As outlined earlier, monotheist religion erased the ‘spiritual’ link of humans to their environment, rendering it expendable in the name of human need or greed. In the same way, the mainstream environment movement has lost its way by simplifying to a single-issue, ‘monotheist’ belief in climate change – to the exclusion of other, arguably equally deleterious trends in human development.

Depending on definitions there are around nine or ten catastrophic environmental issues. Other than climate change, most of are largely ignored in the mainstream ecological debate.

Any one of these has the potential to collapse the human system. All have a critical time-line for action within the next decade or two to avert that outcome.

For example, intensive farming requires fertilizer. While the media often looks at nitrogen, of equal significance is phosphorous. Right now there’s a growing concern about the future supply of phosphorous, and what that means for global food supply within the next 20-30 years. But continuing our use of phosphorous is not an option either as it causes significant damage too.

There are alternatives, specifically agroecology or permaculture. Problem is the ‘business as usual’ lobby don’t like these because it requires abandoning the current system of intensive commodity agriculture, with their concentrated ownership and control over production and markets.

That’s why tackling climate change is attractive to the ‘business as usual’ lobby – it’s a product which can be sold because it entails using more equipment and energy to solve pollution. That’s also why tackling climate change alone will not avert the ecological collapse of human civilisation during this century.

The ‘big lie’

The greatest myth of the consumer society is that modern lifestyles are ‘normal’ – and this can continue forever because we’re clever little apes who can solve any problem.

That hubris, in the face of insurmountable ecological limits, will be our collective downfall.

Dismissing the reality of ecological limits will not make the problem go away. The mainstream environment movement’s overbearing focus on climate change not only makes society ignore many equally critical ecological issues, it also leads people, against the current body of research evidence, to advocate very silly ideas.

However unpopular the issue of criticising economic growth, and however unpopular that makes environmentalists with the leaders of the affluent world, if there is to be any hope of a sustainable and equitable world the environment movement must advocate curtailing consumption to within planetary boundaries.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for everyone to agree on that to begin. You can make a personal start to ‘degrowth’, minimising your own ecological footprint, today. And for that conviction, if you are excluded from the doors of power you always have the option to sit outside.

Paul Mobbs is an environmental and peace campaigner. He runs the Free Range Activism Website (FRAW) and is the author of Energy Beyond Oil and A Practical Guide to Sustainable ICT (which is available free on-line).

For a fully referenced version of this article visit the FRAW site.

2016 will be a decisive year of no return for the unique biodiversity and the swirling currents of a free-flowing Mekong.

The struggle of local communities, NGOs and riparian governments to prevent the the Don Sahong dam in southern Laos from going ahead appears to have failed..

The dam has just been officially launched by the Laos government. Another dam project at Pak Beng is under preparation making it number 3 in a cascade of 11 dams.

The bulldozers and earth-moving machines of the Chinese dam-builder Sinohydro, have already invaded the pristine serenity of Four Thousand Islands (Sipangdon in Southern Laos), one of the world’s finest wetlands and a paradise for eco-tourism.

Nearby a small group of Irrawaddy Dolphins must surely know their days are numbered. Less than two miles downstream from the dam-site in Laos, Cambodia, where 80% of the population depend on fish as their main source of protein, will be devastated by this dam construction that will block the main artery of fish migration between the two countries.

Scientists have been warning for many years, that the proposed cascade of 11 dams on the lower Mekong spell ecological and nutritional disaster, drastically reducing food security, and threatening the survival of the delta in Vietnam.

The (MRC) Mekong River Commission is mandated to protect the riverine environment, but is powerless to put any brakes on this headlong rush into hydropower.

The ‘sustainable hydropower’ discourse at odds with reality

The Laotian regime that tolerates no dissent at home, has been similarly dismissive of the strong opposition from regional NGOs and riparian governments.

The unilateral launch of the Xayaburi dam in 2012 and now the second dam on the mainstream of the Mekong, is turning the river away from the MRC objective of an international river of cooperation and friendship between Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, into another conflict zone over the sharing of water resources.

Video: ‘The Great Gamble’ internet trailer.

However the Lao government is not under any pressure from any of the bodies that ought to be gtrievously concerned: the World Bank, WLE (Water, Land and Ecosystems, a consultancy group); the USAid-sponsored Mekong Partnership for the Environment (MPE); nor other bodies that adhere to the mantra of ‘sustainable hydropower’.

This term identifies a discourse that argues a well-mitigated ‘nice dam’, does not inflict too much damage on the ecosystem. It is a position that offers great comfort and solace to dam developers, investors and banks under fire from environmentalists and scientists.

Within this cluster of concern about water governance and claims to protect the environment of the 4,880 kms long Mekong, there is a grand silence that greets the rapid decline of the region’s longest river and the launch of another dam.

Kim Geheb Mekong region coordinator for the WLE – a research programme for Water, Land and Ecosystems argues the case for ‘sustainable hydropower’ and trade-offs.

“We all enjoy the benefits that come with electric lighting, household appliances”, says Kim Geheb, WLE. “But how do we do this without affecting food production and the health of the environment? How do we ensure that rapid, large-scale dam development is fair and equitable? Answers to these questions are at the heart of what constitutes a ‘good’ dam.”

Disastrous record, and the future looks even worse

The six dams built so far on the Mekong in China, and the two now being built on the Lower Mekong in Laos do not appear to fulfil any obvious criteria for the sustainability principle of what constitutes a ‘good dam.’

The Xayaburi and the Don Sahong dams along the Mekong are neither fair nor equitable, for the overwhelming majority of poor farming communities living downstream from these dams. These two dams both lack credible environmental impact assessments (EIAs), have failed to provide any trans-boundary studies, and have been launched in defiance of wide-ranging protest and riparian objections.

Latest data published by Catch and Culture MRC’s fisheries publication shows that threat posed to the Mekong also has hidden economic costs that result from the damming of the Mekong, which hosts the world’s largest inland fisheries valued at $11 billion.

Estimated fisheries contributed $2.8 billion to Cambodia’s economy in 2015. That’s a big part of Cambodia ‘s $16.71 billion GDP. These are figures for wild-capture fisheries directly under threat from hydro-electric dams.

Studies have shown that the projected loss of fisheries, crops and biodiversity caused by dams will result in a staggeringly high deficit, compared to the modest benefits from increased energy and electricity. The 2015 study calculates the Mekong net loss at minus $2.4 billion ( for 6 dams) and up to -21.8 $billion ( for 11 dams).

Even in economic terms it does not make good sense to build more large dams in a river blessed by such amazing ecological wealth.

The ‘anticipated mitigation’ game – who are they fooling?

Sustainable hydropower and its concern to minimise harm to the environment relies heavily on mitigation technology, and especially such devices as fish passage, fish ladders and even so-called ‘fish-friendly’ turbines.

Christy Owen, party leader of the MPE environmental partnership explained at a recent forum: “This work can help ensure that new development projects meet the needs of business, while minimizing harm to local communities and the environment.”

Her statement assumes that no matter the high stakes, and the calamitous effects of ‘bad dams’, dams are automatically destined to go ahead after a measure of mitigation and refinement

Fish mitigation technology has mostly been applied and tested in northern climes – the rivers of North America, and parts of northern Europe. Importing this technology to the Mekong and other tropical rivers teeming with a vastly greater variety of fish species than in the rivers of colder countries, is seen by most fisheries experts as highly risky at best.

Hydropower consultant working with WWF Dr Jian-Hua Meng views the mitigation carried out by Swiss consultants on the Xayaburi dam as a huge gamble with the river’s natural resources. “They are playing roulette with the livelihoods of over 60 million people. It would not be acceptable in Europe, so why is it different in Asia?”

The mitigation team employed by Mega-First, the Malaysia the developer of the Don Sahong dam, has been trying to construct a fish diversion plan to widen and deepen two much smaller channels than the Sahong channel. However the MRC panel of experts found no evidence that this engineering project would work.

Mekong specialist Dr Philip Hirsch, based at University of Sydney, commented: “After 30 years of studying dam impacts, I have yet to come across one, [dam] whose impacts have been well-mitigated. Let’s start with dams that are already there, before using ‘anticipated mitigation’ as a pretext for going ahead with new projects.”

The evidence is clear: there is nothing sustainable about large dams

A widely cited Oxford University study, published in the journal Energy Policy in March 2014, reviewed data from 245 large dams in 65 different countries, and concluded that large dams in general are not sustainable.

As the authors wrote in a statement attached to the study: “The evidence is conclusive: Large dams in a vast majority of cases are not economically viable. Instead of obtaining hoped-for riches, emerging economies risk drowning their fragile economies in debt owing to ill-advised construction of large dams.”

The global governance debate has clearly shifted business towards paying more attention to environmental protection issues, but not enough to get Thai, Malaysian and Chinese companies to rethink their on-going strategy for damming the Mekong regardless of the consequences.

From his decades of research in the Mekong region Dr Philip Hirsch concludes: “The impacts of some dams are just too great to mitigate.” The Oxford research makes it crystal clear that large dams should not go ahead, he adds.

As Thai environmentalists say: those who offer only unproven mitigation to the 60 million people who depend on a healthy free-flowing Mekong for their food security and livelihood, are selling them short, and abetting a human and ecological catastrophe.

Tom Fawthrop is a freelance journalist working in Southeast Asia. 

Petition: ‘Save the Mekong River- 60 Million people & 78 dolphins!‘ – hosted by Avaaz.

More information: Save the Mekong campaign.

Also on The Ecologist:

• ‘Death by strangulation? Hydropower threatens to kill the mighty Mekong‘ by Tom Fawthrop.
• ‘The Mekong must run free!‘ by Tom Fawthrop.
• ‘Cambodia: indigenous protests repel dam builders – so far‘ by Rod Harbinson.
• ‘Xayaburi dam divides Laos and stirs tension over Mekong hydropower‘ by Brendan Brady.

You’d think they’d have got the message by now, but alas no.

As we enter the fourth year since the launch of the controversial New Alliance project, it continues in the face of scathing criticism and condemnation from civil society.

In theory, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, to give it its full title, is about helping countries in Africa to improve food security, reduce malnutrition and lift people out of poverty.

But in practice, it has long been clear that the New Alliance is merely a way to support multinational agribusiness companies like Monsanto continue their conquest of African markets.

Despite the criticism, the project continues to be backed by the UK’s Department for International Development with public aid money. As the initiative launches its third annual progress report serious questions need to be raised around how a publicly funded aid project can continue to avoid proper accountability.

The focus of this latest progress report remains firmly on measuring the quantity of corporate investments made, and reviewing how many of the pro-business policy reforms have been implemented, across the ten participating African countries. This is done without any analysis of how these investment or policy changes will help to improve food security and nutrition or reduce poverty – which are, after all, the stated aims of the project.

It’s all about business, for business

The progress report simply talks to business, adopting quantifiable indicators shrouded in the language of the private sector.

This prioritisation of corporate needs over and above the stated aims of the project is explicitly exposed by the fact that ‘companies’ is mentioned 113 times and ‘people’ only 4 times, even ‘farmers’ only has 30 mentions. ‘Investment’ is mentioned 101 times, whereas ‘hunger’ has only 5 references.

The failure of the report to give any serious consideration to the social and human impacts of the scheme means it presents a dishonest picture of the New Alliance’s impact. The report comes just weeks after the publication of an entirely separate review of the New Alliance authored by Olivier De Schutter, the former special rapporteur to the UN on food security.

De Schutter’s report – which marks the start of an ongoing EU enquiry in to the New Alliance – is starkly contrasted to the New Alliance’s own review. This scathing review is crystal clear in its conclusion that the New Alliance is hugely inadequate in a number of areas.

Findings included that reforms being pushed in areas such as land titling and seed law are seriously damaging to small-scale farmers. There are also grave risks that women’s rights could be negatively affected by the New Alliance. The project’s failure to integrate nutrition into agriculture means that there is a risk that it will also have long-term negative health impacts.

Crucially, De Schutter also finds that the New Alliance insufficiently conforms to international standards for responsible investment, a particularly worrying finding for a project that is committed to securing some $7.8 billion of investment from 180 private companies.

Poverty reduction? Or corporate welfare?

The misleading way that the New Alliance records its ‘successes’ shows that it considers corporate welfare to be more important to development than real poverty reduction.

The minimal attention the review does pay to the human impacts appears to be limited to measuring the numbers of farmers ‘reached’ – which isn’t explained beyond stating that farmers have primarily been reached by ‘input products and services’ or ‘financial or data services’.

What precisely these things mean is unclear but could simply mean farmers are buying new products or have been given access to finance in order to buy new inputs. All of which is really about increasing business for companies rather than addressing the root causes of food insecurity, under-nutrition and poverty.

If that wasn’t proof enough that the New Alliance is primarily about the promotion of corporate interests in Africa, the report brazenly includes the results of a survey asking businesses to identify what they have found to be the barriers they face in working and investing across the 10 African countries.

It is these business needs that have seemingly formed the basis of the report’s recommendations – almost all of which are either directly or indirectly focused on ensuring an enabling environment for business.

No such survey was carried out with the small-scale farmers who grow food about their barriers to increasing yields or their opinions on agricultural policy, nor was there any such attention given to the people and communities who are impacted by the investments and policy changes, or the intended beneficiaries.

Only one favourable assessment of the New Alliance – its own

What makes the impact of the New Alliance even harder to understand via this progress report is that this latest review has been published as a joint assessment alongside GROW Africa, a related but separate scheme set up in 2011 to galvanise private investment and financing into Africa’s agriculture.

This joint report blurs what results can be attributed to each project, which surely makes it difficult for donor countries such as the UK (who support the project with £600 million in UK aid money) to properly assess where its money has gone, and to what effect.

Despite these inadequacies with the progress report, this is what will be used by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to continue its justification for supporting the project. Global Justice Now has been calling on DFID to withdraw its support from the New Alliance for a number of years.

What is particularly concerning is that De Schutter’s report is far from the first critical review of the New Alliance. A scheme that is only three years old has attracted copious amounts of critiques including reports that expose how the New Alliance is actually detrimental to food security in Africa, reports documenting land grabs happening in the name of the New Alliance and numerous stories of angry communities including in Tanzania and Nigeria who are feeling the negative impacts of corporate investments.

It appears that every other organisation and group that has looked in to the New Alliance comes away clear in their criticism of the scheme.

Which makes it increasingly suspicious that the only assessment of the New Alliance that comes out favourably is its own review.

Aisha Dodwell is campaigns and policy officer at Global Justice Now, working across the food, energy and trade campaigns. Follow Aisha on Twitter @aishadod.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.

2016 will be a decisive year of no return for the unique biodiversity and the swirling currents of a free-flowing Mekong.

The struggle of local communities, NGOs and riparian governments to prevent the the Don Sahong dam in southern Laos from going ahead appears to have failed..

The dam has just been officially launched by the Laos government. Another dam project at Pak Beng is under preparation making it number 3 in a cascade of 11 dams.

The bulldozers and earth-moving machines of the Chinese dam-builder Sinohydro, have already invaded the pristine serenity of Four Thousand Islands (Sipangdon in Southern Laos), one of the world’s finest wetlands and a paradise for eco-tourism.

Nearby a small group of Irrawaddy Dolphins must surely know their days are numbered. Less than two miles downstream from the dam-site in Laos, Cambodia, where 80% of the population depend on fish as their main source of protein, will be devastated by this dam construction that will block the main artery of fish migration between the two countries.

Scientists have been warning for many years, that the proposed cascade of 11 dams on the lower Mekong spell ecological and nutritional disaster, drastically reducing food security, and threatening the survival of the delta in Vietnam.

The (MRC) Mekong River Commission is mandated to protect the riverine environment, but is powerless to put any brakes on this headlong rush into hydropower.

The ‘sustainable hydropower’ discourse at odds with reality

The Laotian regime that tolerates no dissent at home, has been similarly dismissive of the strong opposition from regional NGOs and riparian governments.

The unilateral launch of the Xayaburi dam in 2012 and now the second dam on the mainstream of the Mekong, is turning the river away from the MRC objective of an international river of cooperation and friendship between Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, into another conflict zone over the sharing of water resources.

Video: ‘The Great Gamble’ internet trailer.

However the Lao government is not under any pressure from any of the bodies that ought to be gtrievously concerned: the World Bank, WLE (Water, Land and Ecosystems, a consultancy group); the USAid-sponsored Mekong Partnership for the Environment (MPE); nor other bodies that adhere to the mantra of ‘sustainable hydropower’.

This term identifies a discourse that argues a well-mitigated ‘nice dam’, does not inflict too much damage on the ecosystem. It is a position that offers great comfort and solace to dam developers, investors and banks under fire from environmentalists and scientists.

Within this cluster of concern about water governance and claims to protect the environment of the 4,880 kms long Mekong, there is a grand silence that greets the rapid decline of the region’s longest river and the launch of another dam.

Kim Geheb Mekong region coordinator for the WLE – a research programme for Water, Land and Ecosystems argues the case for ‘sustainable hydropower’ and trade-offs.

“We all enjoy the benefits that come with electric lighting, household appliances”, says Kim Geheb, WLE. “But how do we do this without affecting food production and the health of the environment? How do we ensure that rapid, large-scale dam development is fair and equitable? Answers to these questions are at the heart of what constitutes a ‘good’ dam.”

Disastrous record, and the future looks even worse

The six dams built so far on the Mekong in China, and the two now being built on the Lower Mekong in Laos do not appear to fulfil any obvious criteria for the sustainability principle of what constitutes a ‘good dam.’

The Xayaburi and the Don Sahong dams along the Mekong are neither fair nor equitable, for the overwhelming majority of poor farming communities living downstream from these dams. These two dams both lack credible environmental impact assessments (EIAs), have failed to provide any trans-boundary studies, and have been launched in defiance of wide-ranging protest and riparian objections.

Latest data published by Catch and Culture MRC’s fisheries publication shows that threat posed to the Mekong also has hidden economic costs that result from the damming of the Mekong, which hosts the world’s largest inland fisheries valued at $11 billion.

Estimated fisheries contributed $2.8 billion to Cambodia’s economy in 2015. That’s a big part of Cambodia ‘s $16.71 billion GDP. These are figures for wild-capture fisheries directly under threat from hydro-electric dams.

Studies have shown that the projected loss of fisheries, crops and biodiversity caused by dams will result in a staggeringly high deficit, compared to the modest benefits from increased energy and electricity. The 2015 study calculates the Mekong net loss at minus $2.4 billion ( for 6 dams) and up to -21.8 $billion ( for 11 dams).

Even in economic terms it does not make good sense to build more large dams in a river blessed by such amazing ecological wealth.

The ‘anticipated mitigation’ game – who are they fooling?

Sustainable hydropower and its concern to minimise harm to the environment relies heavily on mitigation technology, and especially such devices as fish passage, fish ladders and even so-called ‘fish-friendly’ turbines.

Christy Owen, party leader of the MPE environmental partnership explained at a recent forum: “This work can help ensure that new development projects meet the needs of business, while minimizing harm to local communities and the environment.”

Her statement assumes that no matter the high stakes, and the calamitous effects of ‘bad dams’, dams are automatically destined to go ahead after a measure of mitigation and refinement

Fish mitigation technology has mostly been applied and tested in northern climes – the rivers of North America, and parts of northern Europe. Importing this technology to the Mekong and other tropical rivers teeming with a vastly greater variety of fish species than in the rivers of colder countries, is seen by most fisheries experts as highly risky at best.

Hydropower consultant working with WWF Dr Jian-Hua Meng views the mitigation carried out by Swiss consultants on the Xayaburi dam as a huge gamble with the river’s natural resources. “They are playing roulette with the livelihoods of over 60 million people. It would not be acceptable in Europe, so why is it different in Asia?”

The mitigation team employed by Mega-First, the Malaysia the developer of the Don Sahong dam, has been trying to construct a fish diversion plan to widen and deepen two much smaller channels than the Sahong channel. However the MRC panel of experts found no evidence that this engineering project would work.

Mekong specialist Dr Philip Hirsch, based at University of Sydney, commented: “After 30 years of studying dam impacts, I have yet to come across one, [dam] whose impacts have been well-mitigated. Let’s start with dams that are already there, before using ‘anticipated mitigation’ as a pretext for going ahead with new projects.”

The evidence is clear: there is nothing sustainable about large dams

A widely cited Oxford University study, published in the journal Energy Policy in March 2014, reviewed data from 245 large dams in 65 different countries, and concluded that large dams in general are not sustainable.

As the authors wrote in a statement attached to the study: “The evidence is conclusive: Large dams in a vast majority of cases are not economically viable. Instead of obtaining hoped-for riches, emerging economies risk drowning their fragile economies in debt owing to ill-advised construction of large dams.”

The global governance debate has clearly shifted business towards paying more attention to environmental protection issues, but not enough to get Thai, Malaysian and Chinese companies to rethink their on-going strategy for damming the Mekong regardless of the consequences.

From his decades of research in the Mekong region Dr Philip Hirsch concludes: “The impacts of some dams are just too great to mitigate.” The Oxford research makes it crystal clear that large dams should not go ahead, he adds.

As Thai environmentalists say: those who offer only unproven mitigation to the 60 million people who depend on a healthy free-flowing Mekong for their food security and livelihood, are selling them short, and abetting a human and ecological catastrophe.

Tom Fawthrop is a freelance journalist working in Southeast Asia. 

Petition: ‘Save the Mekong River- 60 Million people & 78 dolphins!‘ – hosted by Avaaz.

More information: Save the Mekong campaign.

Also on The Ecologist:

• ‘Death by strangulation? Hydropower threatens to kill the mighty Mekong‘ by Tom Fawthrop.
• ‘The Mekong must run free!‘ by Tom Fawthrop.
• ‘Cambodia: indigenous protests repel dam builders – so far‘ by Rod Harbinson.
• ‘Xayaburi dam divides Laos and stirs tension over Mekong hydropower‘ by Brendan Brady.

You’d think they’d have got the message by now, but alas no.

As we enter the fourth year since the launch of the controversial New Alliance project, it continues in the face of scathing criticism and condemnation from civil society.

In theory, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, to give it its full title, is about helping countries in Africa to improve food security, reduce malnutrition and lift people out of poverty.

But in practice, it has long been clear that the New Alliance is merely a way to support multinational agribusiness companies like Monsanto continue their conquest of African markets.

Despite the criticism, the project continues to be backed by the UK’s Department for International Development with public aid money. As the initiative launches its third annual progress report serious questions need to be raised around how a publicly funded aid project can continue to avoid proper accountability.

The focus of this latest progress report remains firmly on measuring the quantity of corporate investments made, and reviewing how many of the pro-business policy reforms have been implemented, across the ten participating African countries. This is done without any analysis of how these investment or policy changes will help to improve food security and nutrition or reduce poverty – which are, after all, the stated aims of the project.

It’s all about business, for business

The progress report simply talks to business, adopting quantifiable indicators shrouded in the language of the private sector.

This prioritisation of corporate needs over and above the stated aims of the project is explicitly exposed by the fact that ‘companies’ is mentioned 113 times and ‘people’ only 4 times, even ‘farmers’ only has 30 mentions. ‘Investment’ is mentioned 101 times, whereas ‘hunger’ has only 5 references.

The failure of the report to give any serious consideration to the social and human impacts of the scheme means it presents a dishonest picture of the New Alliance’s impact. The report comes just weeks after the publication of an entirely separate review of the New Alliance authored by Olivier De Schutter, the former special rapporteur to the UN on food security.

De Schutter’s report – which marks the start of an ongoing EU enquiry in to the New Alliance – is starkly contrasted to the New Alliance’s own review. This scathing review is crystal clear in its conclusion that the New Alliance is hugely inadequate in a number of areas.

Findings included that reforms being pushed in areas such as land titling and seed law are seriously damaging to small-scale farmers. There are also grave risks that women’s rights could be negatively affected by the New Alliance. The project’s failure to integrate nutrition into agriculture means that there is a risk that it will also have long-term negative health impacts.

Crucially, De Schutter also finds that the New Alliance insufficiently conforms to international standards for responsible investment, a particularly worrying finding for a project that is committed to securing some $7.8 billion of investment from 180 private companies.

Poverty reduction? Or corporate welfare?

The misleading way that the New Alliance records its ‘successes’ shows that it considers corporate welfare to be more important to development than real poverty reduction.

The minimal attention the review does pay to the human impacts appears to be limited to measuring the numbers of farmers ‘reached’ – which isn’t explained beyond stating that farmers have primarily been reached by ‘input products and services’ or ‘financial or data services’.

What precisely these things mean is unclear but could simply mean farmers are buying new products or have been given access to finance in order to buy new inputs. All of which is really about increasing business for companies rather than addressing the root causes of food insecurity, under-nutrition and poverty.

If that wasn’t proof enough that the New Alliance is primarily about the promotion of corporate interests in Africa, the report brazenly includes the results of a survey asking businesses to identify what they have found to be the barriers they face in working and investing across the 10 African countries.

It is these business needs that have seemingly formed the basis of the report’s recommendations – almost all of which are either directly or indirectly focused on ensuring an enabling environment for business.

No such survey was carried out with the small-scale farmers who grow food about their barriers to increasing yields or their opinions on agricultural policy, nor was there any such attention given to the people and communities who are impacted by the investments and policy changes, or the intended beneficiaries.

Only one favourable assessment of the New Alliance – its own

What makes the impact of the New Alliance even harder to understand via this progress report is that this latest review has been published as a joint assessment alongside GROW Africa, a related but separate scheme set up in 2011 to galvanise private investment and financing into Africa’s agriculture.

This joint report blurs what results can be attributed to each project, which surely makes it difficult for donor countries such as the UK (who support the project with £600 million in UK aid money) to properly assess where its money has gone, and to what effect.

Despite these inadequacies with the progress report, this is what will be used by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to continue its justification for supporting the project. Global Justice Now has been calling on DFID to withdraw its support from the New Alliance for a number of years.

What is particularly concerning is that De Schutter’s report is far from the first critical review of the New Alliance. A scheme that is only three years old has attracted copious amounts of critiques including reports that expose how the New Alliance is actually detrimental to food security in Africa, reports documenting land grabs happening in the name of the New Alliance and numerous stories of angry communities including in Tanzania and Nigeria who are feeling the negative impacts of corporate investments.

It appears that every other organisation and group that has looked in to the New Alliance comes away clear in their criticism of the scheme.

Which makes it increasingly suspicious that the only assessment of the New Alliance that comes out favourably is its own review.

Aisha Dodwell is campaigns and policy officer at Global Justice Now, working across the food, energy and trade campaigns. Follow Aisha on Twitter @aishadod.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.

2016 will be a decisive year of no return for the unique biodiversity and the swirling currents of a free-flowing Mekong.

The struggle of local communities, NGOs and riparian governments to prevent the the Don Sahong dam in southern Laos from going ahead appears to have failed..

The dam has just been officially launched by the Laos government. Another dam project at Pak Beng is under preparation making it number 3 in a cascade of 11 dams.

The bulldozers and earth-moving machines of the Chinese dam-builder Sinohydro, have already invaded the pristine serenity of Four Thousand Islands (Sipangdon in Southern Laos), one of the world’s finest wetlands and a paradise for eco-tourism.

Nearby a small group of Irrawaddy Dolphins must surely know their days are numbered. Less than two miles downstream from the dam-site in Laos, Cambodia, where 80% of the population depend on fish as their main source of protein, will be devastated by this dam construction that will block the main artery of fish migration between the two countries.

Scientists have been warning for many years, that the proposed cascade of 11 dams on the lower Mekong spell ecological and nutritional disaster, drastically reducing food security, and threatening the survival of the delta in Vietnam.

The (MRC) Mekong River Commission is mandated to protect the riverine environment, but is powerless to put any brakes on this headlong rush into hydropower.

The ‘sustainable hydropower’ discourse at odds with reality

The Laotian regime that tolerates no dissent at home, has been similarly dismissive of the strong opposition from regional NGOs and riparian governments.

The unilateral launch of the Xayaburi dam in 2012 and now the second dam on the mainstream of the Mekong, is turning the river away from the MRC objective of an international river of cooperation and friendship between Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, into another conflict zone over the sharing of water resources.

Video: ‘The Great Gamble’ internet trailer.

However the Lao government is not under any pressure from any of the bodies that ought to be gtrievously concerned: the World Bank, WLE (Water, Land and Ecosystems, a consultancy group); the USAid-sponsored Mekong Partnership for the Environment (MPE); nor other bodies that adhere to the mantra of ‘sustainable hydropower’.

This term identifies a discourse that argues a well-mitigated ‘nice dam’, does not inflict too much damage on the ecosystem. It is a position that offers great comfort and solace to dam developers, investors and banks under fire from environmentalists and scientists.

Within this cluster of concern about water governance and claims to protect the environment of the 4,880 kms long Mekong, there is a grand silence that greets the rapid decline of the region’s longest river and the launch of another dam.

Kim Geheb Mekong region coordinator for the WLE – a research programme for Water, Land and Ecosystems argues the case for ‘sustainable hydropower’ and trade-offs.

“We all enjoy the benefits that come with electric lighting, household appliances”, says Kim Geheb, WLE. “But how do we do this without affecting food production and the health of the environment? How do we ensure that rapid, large-scale dam development is fair and equitable? Answers to these questions are at the heart of what constitutes a ‘good’ dam.”

Disastrous record, and the future looks even worse

The six dams built so far on the Mekong in China, and the two now being built on the Lower Mekong in Laos do not appear to fulfil any obvious criteria for the sustainability principle of what constitutes a ‘good dam.’

The Xayaburi and the Don Sahong dams along the Mekong are neither fair nor equitable, for the overwhelming majority of poor farming communities living downstream from these dams. These two dams both lack credible environmental impact assessments (EIAs), have failed to provide any trans-boundary studies, and have been launched in defiance of wide-ranging protest and riparian objections.

Latest data published by Catch and Culture MRC’s fisheries publication shows that threat posed to the Mekong also has hidden economic costs that result from the damming of the Mekong, which hosts the world’s largest inland fisheries valued at $11 billion.

Estimated fisheries contributed $2.8 billion to Cambodia’s economy in 2015. That’s a big part of Cambodia ‘s $16.71 billion GDP. These are figures for wild-capture fisheries directly under threat from hydro-electric dams.

Studies have shown that the projected loss of fisheries, crops and biodiversity caused by dams will result in a staggeringly high deficit, compared to the modest benefits from increased energy and electricity. The 2015 study calculates the Mekong net loss at minus $2.4 billion ( for 6 dams) and up to -21.8 $billion ( for 11 dams).

Even in economic terms it does not make good sense to build more large dams in a river blessed by such amazing ecological wealth.

The ‘anticipated mitigation’ game – who are they fooling?

Sustainable hydropower and its concern to minimise harm to the environment relies heavily on mitigation technology, and especially such devices as fish passage, fish ladders and even so-called ‘fish-friendly’ turbines.

Christy Owen, party leader of the MPE environmental partnership explained at a recent forum: “This work can help ensure that new development projects meet the needs of business, while minimizing harm to local communities and the environment.”

Her statement assumes that no matter the high stakes, and the calamitous effects of ‘bad dams’, dams are automatically destined to go ahead after a measure of mitigation and refinement

Fish mitigation technology has mostly been applied and tested in northern climes – the rivers of North America, and parts of northern Europe. Importing this technology to the Mekong and other tropical rivers teeming with a vastly greater variety of fish species than in the rivers of colder countries, is seen by most fisheries experts as highly risky at best.

Hydropower consultant working with WWF Dr Jian-Hua Meng views the mitigation carried out by Swiss consultants on the Xayaburi dam as a huge gamble with the river’s natural resources. “They are playing roulette with the livelihoods of over 60 million people. It would not be acceptable in Europe, so why is it different in Asia?”

The mitigation team employed by Mega-First, the Malaysia the developer of the Don Sahong dam, has been trying to construct a fish diversion plan to widen and deepen two much smaller channels than the Sahong channel. However the MRC panel of experts found no evidence that this engineering project would work.

Mekong specialist Dr Philip Hirsch, based at University of Sydney, commented: “After 30 years of studying dam impacts, I have yet to come across one, [dam] whose impacts have been well-mitigated. Let’s start with dams that are already there, before using ‘anticipated mitigation’ as a pretext for going ahead with new projects.”

The evidence is clear: there is nothing sustainable about large dams

A widely cited Oxford University study, published in the journal Energy Policy in March 2014, reviewed data from 245 large dams in 65 different countries, and concluded that large dams in general are not sustainable.

As the authors wrote in a statement attached to the study: “The evidence is conclusive: Large dams in a vast majority of cases are not economically viable. Instead of obtaining hoped-for riches, emerging economies risk drowning their fragile economies in debt owing to ill-advised construction of large dams.”

The global governance debate has clearly shifted business towards paying more attention to environmental protection issues, but not enough to get Thai, Malaysian and Chinese companies to rethink their on-going strategy for damming the Mekong regardless of the consequences.

From his decades of research in the Mekong region Dr Philip Hirsch concludes: “The impacts of some dams are just too great to mitigate.” The Oxford research makes it crystal clear that large dams should not go ahead, he adds.

As Thai environmentalists say: those who offer only unproven mitigation to the 60 million people who depend on a healthy free-flowing Mekong for their food security and livelihood, are selling them short, and abetting a human and ecological catastrophe.

Tom Fawthrop is a freelance journalist working in Southeast Asia. 

Petition: ‘Save the Mekong River- 60 Million people & 78 dolphins!‘ – hosted by Avaaz.

More information: Save the Mekong campaign.

Also on The Ecologist:

• ‘Death by strangulation? Hydropower threatens to kill the mighty Mekong‘ by Tom Fawthrop.
• ‘The Mekong must run free!‘ by Tom Fawthrop.
• ‘Cambodia: indigenous protests repel dam builders – so far‘ by Rod Harbinson.
• ‘Xayaburi dam divides Laos and stirs tension over Mekong hydropower‘ by Brendan Brady.

You’d think they’d have got the message by now, but alas no.

As we enter the fourth year since the launch of the controversial New Alliance project, it continues in the face of scathing criticism and condemnation from civil society.

In theory, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, to give it its full title, is about helping countries in Africa to improve food security, reduce malnutrition and lift people out of poverty.

But in practice, it has long been clear that the New Alliance is merely a way to support multinational agribusiness companies like Monsanto continue their conquest of African markets.

Despite the criticism, the project continues to be backed by the UK’s Department for International Development with public aid money. As the initiative launches its third annual progress report serious questions need to be raised around how a publicly funded aid project can continue to avoid proper accountability.

The focus of this latest progress report remains firmly on measuring the quantity of corporate investments made, and reviewing how many of the pro-business policy reforms have been implemented, across the ten participating African countries. This is done without any analysis of how these investment or policy changes will help to improve food security and nutrition or reduce poverty – which are, after all, the stated aims of the project.

It’s all about business, for business

The progress report simply talks to business, adopting quantifiable indicators shrouded in the language of the private sector.

This prioritisation of corporate needs over and above the stated aims of the project is explicitly exposed by the fact that ‘companies’ is mentioned 113 times and ‘people’ only 4 times, even ‘farmers’ only has 30 mentions. ‘Investment’ is mentioned 101 times, whereas ‘hunger’ has only 5 references.

The failure of the report to give any serious consideration to the social and human impacts of the scheme means it presents a dishonest picture of the New Alliance’s impact. The report comes just weeks after the publication of an entirely separate review of the New Alliance authored by Olivier De Schutter, the former special rapporteur to the UN on food security.

De Schutter’s report – which marks the start of an ongoing EU enquiry in to the New Alliance – is starkly contrasted to the New Alliance’s own review. This scathing review is crystal clear in its conclusion that the New Alliance is hugely inadequate in a number of areas.

Findings included that reforms being pushed in areas such as land titling and seed law are seriously damaging to small-scale farmers. There are also grave risks that women’s rights could be negatively affected by the New Alliance. The project’s failure to integrate nutrition into agriculture means that there is a risk that it will also have long-term negative health impacts.

Crucially, De Schutter also finds that the New Alliance insufficiently conforms to international standards for responsible investment, a particularly worrying finding for a project that is committed to securing some $7.8 billion of investment from 180 private companies.

Poverty reduction? Or corporate welfare?

The misleading way that the New Alliance records its ‘successes’ shows that it considers corporate welfare to be more important to development than real poverty reduction.

The minimal attention the review does pay to the human impacts appears to be limited to measuring the numbers of farmers ‘reached’ – which isn’t explained beyond stating that farmers have primarily been reached by ‘input products and services’ or ‘financial or data services’.

What precisely these things mean is unclear but could simply mean farmers are buying new products or have been given access to finance in order to buy new inputs. All of which is really about increasing business for companies rather than addressing the root causes of food insecurity, under-nutrition and poverty.

If that wasn’t proof enough that the New Alliance is primarily about the promotion of corporate interests in Africa, the report brazenly includes the results of a survey asking businesses to identify what they have found to be the barriers they face in working and investing across the 10 African countries.

It is these business needs that have seemingly formed the basis of the report’s recommendations – almost all of which are either directly or indirectly focused on ensuring an enabling environment for business.

No such survey was carried out with the small-scale farmers who grow food about their barriers to increasing yields or their opinions on agricultural policy, nor was there any such attention given to the people and communities who are impacted by the investments and policy changes, or the intended beneficiaries.

Only one favourable assessment of the New Alliance – its own

What makes the impact of the New Alliance even harder to understand via this progress report is that this latest review has been published as a joint assessment alongside GROW Africa, a related but separate scheme set up in 2011 to galvanise private investment and financing into Africa’s agriculture.

This joint report blurs what results can be attributed to each project, which surely makes it difficult for donor countries such as the UK (who support the project with £600 million in UK aid money) to properly assess where its money has gone, and to what effect.

Despite these inadequacies with the progress report, this is what will be used by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to continue its justification for supporting the project. Global Justice Now has been calling on DFID to withdraw its support from the New Alliance for a number of years.

What is particularly concerning is that De Schutter’s report is far from the first critical review of the New Alliance. A scheme that is only three years old has attracted copious amounts of critiques including reports that expose how the New Alliance is actually detrimental to food security in Africa, reports documenting land grabs happening in the name of the New Alliance and numerous stories of angry communities including in Tanzania and Nigeria who are feeling the negative impacts of corporate investments.

It appears that every other organisation and group that has looked in to the New Alliance comes away clear in their criticism of the scheme.

Which makes it increasingly suspicious that the only assessment of the New Alliance that comes out favourably is its own review.

Aisha Dodwell is campaigns and policy officer at Global Justice Now, working across the food, energy and trade campaigns. Follow Aisha on Twitter @aishadod.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.