By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jan 10, 2011 (IPS) - A steady rise of new dams in Cambodia is becoming a platform for the country’s prime minister to showcase where the Southeast Asian kingdom’s ties with China - a late arrival among Cambodia’s foreign aid and development partners - is headed.
"The hydropower dam is just one of the numerous achievements under the cooperation between Cambodia and China," Premier Hun Sen said in December at a ceremony in a remote South-western province of the country where the 338 megawatt Russei Chrum Krom hydropower dam is being built.
This 500-million-U.S.-dollar dam - being built by the Huadian Corp., one of China’s biggest state-owned power companies - is the largest of five Chinese dams under construction in energy-poor Cambodia, where only a fifth of the population of nearly 14.5 million have access to electricity.
Chinese companies are already carrying out feasibility studies for four more dams to be built, say environmentalists and grassroots activists worried about what such future hydropower projects portend.
"China plays a very important role in investment and development in Cambodia. But it should take account of the importance of EIAs [environmental impact assessments] and SIAs [social impact assessments]," Chhith Sam Ath, executive director of the NGO Forum on Cambodia, said during a telephone interview from Phnom Penh, where his grassroots network for local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is based. "At times the EIA process is not open to the public and there is little time to comment," Ath told IPS.
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