Mekong nations face growing threat to food security amid claims China’s dams exacerbate effects of drought
Fishermen in northeast Thailand say they have seen catches in the Mekong River plunge, while some farmers in Vietnam and Cambodia are leaving for jobs in cities as harvests of rice and other crops shrink. The common thread driving these events is erratic water levels in ...
Laura Zhou
Monitoring and evaluation training workshop
HDFF will run a training workshop on monitoring and evaluation of development projects, 21-25 September in Bangkok. Registration closes 9 September. Earlybird discount until 31 August. ...
Chinese dams and the Mekong drought
The latest reports from the Lower Mekong Basin are cause for growing concern that another period of drought will succeed that of 2019, affecting Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Expected rainfall from late May through June and July has not arrived, and the level of ...
MILTON OSBORNE
Remote Myanmar gets ready for tourism boom
After a decades-long blanket ban on tourists, Kayah State in eastern Myanmar has opened up to the outside world. Travellers are pouring in to get a glimpse of its untouched beauty. As Pichayada Promchertchoo reports, the remote state is hoping to develop a tourist industry without losing ...
4th WriteShop for Mekong Writers: call for writers on development and environmental issues
Mekong Commons and iMekong are calling for writers to apply for the 4th WriteShop for Mekong writers, by August 4, 2017. There are 15 places available, and the workshop aims to ‘bring together writers and researchers to build capacity to think critically, and produce a ...
Thai agricultural GDP almost back at 2019 level as demand rises
Thailand’s third-quarter agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) recovered to drop by only 0.4 per cent year on year, the Office of Agricultural Economics said on Wednesday.The office secretary-general Chantanon Wannakejohn said production of economic crops, such as rice, tapioca, pineapple, palm oil, mangosteen and rambutan ...
The Nation Reporter
OPINION: A year since the transient worker Covid crisis: Lessons for Southeast Asia
April marked the one-year anniversary since most countries in the world went into some form of lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19. The pandemic first and foremost has exposed gaps in current labour practices towards low-skilled transient (migrant) workers across Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore, ...
FANZURA BANU AND SHEE SIEW YING
China’s Mekong plans threaten disaster for countries downstream
Thirty million people depend for a living on the Mekong, the great Asian river that runs through Southeast Asia from its origins in the snowfields of Tibet to its end in the delta region of Vietnam, where it fertilizes one of the world’s richest agricultural ...
Richard Bernstein
RCSD to host summer school on Mekong land relations
Land governance is a concept that cuts across academic disciplines, bridging social and environmental sciences, an understanding of legal frameworks, political economy and policy studies.RCSD, Faculty of Social Sciences, CMU hosts the Mekong Land Research Forum. Together they run a week-long summer school on researching ...
Thao Nguyen Phan review – tribute to the Mekong River's myth and might
Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium opens with sound: an outboard motor puttering in the dark. The tea-brown, silt-clouded water of the Mekong appears, gliding beneath the prow of a little boat. Lines from the great poet Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener lap the screen, concluding: “Why did the ...
Hettie Judah
SDG 4 Quality education
SDG 4 – “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” – is made up of a global monitoring framework of 10 targets and, starting in 2020, 12 indicators. Education is considered a fundamental human right1 and a core enabler ...
Urban administration and development
The Lower Mekong region is home to some of the world’s most dynamic cities. Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Yangon all have populations in excess of 5 million and are still growing. Phnom Penh and Vientiane are smaller but their growth has been ...
United States and Vietnam Convene 17 Friends of the Mekong in Support of a Secure, Prosperous, and Open Mekong Region
On January 12, the United States and Vietnam co-hosted the first Friends of the Mekong Policy Dialogue under the new Mekong-U.S. Partnership. In his remarks, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Ambassador Atul Keshap emphasized that the United States ...
U.S. Mission Cambodia
Mekong Institute to host Mekong Forum in Khon Kaen
The Mekong Institute will host the 2017 Mekong Forum in Khon Kaen, Thailand on July 14, 2017, with the theme for the event as “New geo-economics: Reshaping the future of the GMS?” Read their release and call for participants below, or at the 2017 Mekong Forum website.—“New geo-economics: ...
China promises its Mekong neighbours priority access to a coronavirus vaccine developed in China
China stepped up its vaccine diplomacy on Monday with Premier Li Keqiang promising five Southeast Asian partners priority access to a coronavirus vaccine while also pledging to share water control information for flood-hit nations along the Mekong River. Li made the remarks at a videoconference of the Lancang-Mekong ...
Keegan Elmer
ONLINE PANEL DISCUSSION: Haze and Social (In)Justice in Southeast Asia: Past Experience and What Next?
In this our first Political Ecology in Asia Seminar, coinciding with the International Conference on New Research in International Development, Human Rights, and International Relations at a Time of Disruption, we focus on the issue of social justice and air pollution. The discussion will examine ...
USAID and NASA launch technology
USAID and NASA have launched “SERVIR-Mekong,” promoting satellite imagery to help the Lower Mekong predict and cope with natural disasters and increase resilience to the negative effects of climate change. ...
Lancang-Mekong Cooperation: After Five Fruitful Years, A New Journey Awaits
On March 23, 2016, the first LMC Leaders’ Meeting was successfully held in Sanya, Hainan. In the spirit of a “shared river, shared future”, leaders of China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam jointly announced the launch of the LMC – a new type of ...
Wang Yi
Are China’s dams responsible for droughts along Mekong River?
Chinese dams aren’t the problem causing droughts for downstream nations along the Mekong River – they are part of the solution – says a Chinese study released in July. The study is an attempt to pour water on claims by a rival US-backed investigation that blamed dams ...
Maria Siow
Myanmar migrant workers in 2019 exceed 300,000
Over 305,000 people went overseas for work during 2019 according to the data from the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population. Monthly numbers of workers going abroad from January to November 2019 are 23,235 in January, 22,523 in February, 22,534 in March, 20,766 in April, 30,326 ...
Yu Wai