BANGKOK - A United Nations agency said on Friday deforestation was a major cause of the floods that
have devastated Indochina and the Mekong delta in the last month.
The UN's Economic & Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) said in a statement
forests in most Asian countries had been reduced to about 25 percent of land area in 1995 from 70
percent in 1945. Other causes of the floods were a reduction in river channels and drainage, reclamation
of flood plains and wetlands and a rapid expansion of urban and residential areas, ESCAP said.
Heavy rain in the past month across Indochina and the Mekong delta have killed hundreds of people and
forced more than a million others from their homes in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.
Water levels in Vietnam's Mekong Delta appeared to be stabilising on Friday but the toll in the region's
worst floods in decades rose to at least 66, mostly children.
The Laotian Ministry of Agriculture said the flooding, the worst in the country since 1978, had affected
18,423 families and damaged 48,724 hectares (120,395 acres) of farmland nationwide.
Flood waters that have caused misery in northern and northeastern Thailand have begun to spill into the
country's central plains, reaching Ayutthaya, just 76 km (47 miles) north of Bangkok, officials said on
Friday. Concerns have been raised over the safety of the Ayutthaya World Heritage site, comprising
ancient palaces, ruins and temples, some of which were damaged by floods in 1995.
A two-metre (6.6 feet) concrete flood wall was being built on the banks of the Chao Phrya river to protect
the historic city from floods. ESCAP said the intensity of flood disasters had increased in the region
during the past few years, causing increasingly serious social and economic impact on the developing
nations. An ESCAP regional survey showed the floods in 1998 caused nearly 7,000 deaths, damaged
more than six million houses, and destroyed nearly 25 million hectares (61.8 million acres) of crops in
Bangladesh, China, India and Vietnam.
THAILAND: September 25, 2000 - REUTERS NEWS SERVICE.
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8322#top
HANOI, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Vietnam says neighbouring China should ensure its dam building on the upper parts of the Mekong River does not harm the environment along the river further downstream. "We think that the use of Mekong River should not cause any impact on the quality and quantity of water in the Mekong River," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said in a statement seen on Friday. "(It) should ensure the sustainability of the ecological environment of the entire river as well as legitimate and equal interest of all the countries located in the basin." Thanh was responding to an article in the latest edition of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review magazine that said environmentalists were worried about the potential effect of a dam nearing completion in southern China's Yunnan province.
The new dam was apparently not a factor in devastating floods this year in the lower Mekong River region which have killed about 600 people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. But the environmentalists feared it would harm the environment downstream by increasing industrial pollution, obstructing fish migration and trapping silt that enriches soil, the magazine said. The Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam is the country's key rice-growing area. The massive dam, the second of 14 planned hydroelectric dams on the Chinese section of the river, is expected to be completed next year, the magazine said. The Red Cross and United Nations have blamed deforestation for the Mekong floods and warned of worse to come.