Cambodia: NGO Wary of Promise to Cancel Hydropower Dam Project

Cambodia: NGO Wary of Promise to Cancel Hydropower Dam Project

Conservationists remain wary of the government's recent pledge to sideline
construction of the controversial Chhay Areng hydropower dam after finding
the project on the Mines and Energy Ministry's new to-do list.

After a February 17 Council of Ministers meeting, the government announced
that plans to build the dam in the heart of Koh Kong province's pristine
Cardamom Mountains were indefinitely on hold and being replaced by an
upgrade to an existing coal-fired power plant far away. At the time, council
spokesman Phay Siphan said Prime Minister Hun Sen wanted to preserve the
site for its ecotourism potential.

The same day, however, Mr. Siphan posted to his Facebook page part of the
Energy Ministry's 2017 to 2030 master plan, including power projects that
"have to be developed."

The list includes both the expansion of the coal-fired plant in Preah
Sihanouk province and the Chhay Areng dam, scheduled to go online in 2023.

Contacted on Tuesday, Mr. Siphan said the prime minister's decision at last
month's meeting to preserve the Areng valley for tourism took precedence and
insisted that the dam was effectively off the development list.

"It was a proposal, but the prime minister stated clearly that he is not
going to allow" it, he said. "The Environment Ministry is going to comply
with what the prime minister said."

Energy Ministry spokesman Victor Jona said the master plan was created
before this year and remained a "living document."

"The Ministry of Mines and Energy reserves the rights to deviate from that
plan. In fact, the master plan is revised every three to five years," he
said.

But the dam's opponents, who welcomed the government's claims to put tourism
ahead of electricity in the valley, remain skeptical.

NGO Mother Nature spent years campaigning against the project, warning that
it would flood vital habitats for some rare and endangered animals, and the
ancestral land of hundreds of indigenous minority Chong. Co-founder Alex
Gonzalez-Davidson, a Spanish national, was deported from Cambodia in early
2015 over an illegal checkpoint he had helped to man along a road leading in
and out of the Areng valley.

He said the dam's inclusion on the ministry's new master plan made it hard
to believe the word of a government that has proved willing to sign over
vast tracts of protected areas to damaging development projects.

"The government's greed and ignorance eventually supersedes all
decision-making and all relevant laws, as we have seen time and again in
Cambodia," he said. "Second, if the government had truly abandoned plans to
build the Areng dam for good, then why are they proceeding with building
high voltage transmission lines across the site of the proposed dam? Is it
to eventually connect the dam to these lines?"

At the same meeting last month at which the Council of Ministers supposedly
froze the Areng dam project, it approved the construction of a power line
from Phnom Penh to the operating Stung Tatai dam in Koh Kong that will cut
through the Areng valley.

Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson said the government would do much better at convincing
the public that the Areng dam was dead by sparing the valley the power line
and granting the Chong families the communal land title they have been
seeking for years.

Communal titles are designed to give indigenous communities added protection
against outside developers, but NGOs have criticized the government for
approving very few of them since making them available in 2001.

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Link to Original Article:
https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/ngo-wary-of-promise-to-cancel-hydropower-
dam-project-126565/

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John Diecker
APT Consulting Group Co., Ltd.

www.aptthailand.com