Since arriving in Phnom Penh, I’ve already managed two short trips down to Kampot, a somnolent town 150km south of the capital. Although both were work trips, I was struck by the charm of the town’s riverine setting and have planned a dedicated weekend of reading and indolence at the French-run Les Manguiers guesthouse, whose small wooden bungalows gaze over the pine-dark expanses of the Kamchay River.
My first trip was on a press junket with the Centre Culturel Français (CCF), which has been running a dry-season portable cinema tour of the country, designed to bring the stunning proboscises of French cinema to the benighted hinterlands. While in Kampot, the CCF screened Didier, a film in the high Gallic tradition of nonsensical, slickly-produced slapstick, in which a pet dog (the eponymous hero) is transformed into a human, thereby casting the narcissistic bourgeois world of his owners into utter chaos. To my mind, the only thing missing from this film was either Gérard Depardieu or Daniel Auteil, but straight-man Jean-Pierre Bacri filled their customary spots with aplomb. The locals — who turned out in their hundreds on motorbikes and on foot — loved Didier, which I suppose provided a rough (though better-acted) analogue to the pie-in-the-face antics of Cambodian cinema.
The week before last I got a chance to return to Kampot with my colleague Sokheng to tour the large hydroelectric dam that is under construction on the Kamchay River 15km north of the town. The weather was dire, reducing Highway 3 to a honeycomb of pot-holes and rust-red puddles, through which lorries and buses lurched with audible exhaustion. But under sheets of May rain, the countryside of Kampot province was stunningly picturesque: the dun-coloured paddy fields, bracketed by mango trees and bandy-legged borassus palms, were dotted with the incipient emerald pin-pricks of the coming harvest. As the highway wound down towards the coast, the farms melted away into forested hills, the limestone karst peaks of the Elephant Mountains rearing up like tethered balloons in the low-lying mist.
Kampot itself lies in a verdant bend of the soon-to-be-dammed Kamchay River, some 10km upstream from the Gulf of Thailand. Even in the town, the water is pure and parasite-free, at least by the Mekong’s standards; but environmentalists fear that the construction of the dam to the north could lead to the release of toxic blue-green algae from the reservoir’s ground soils, resulting in deleterious effects downstream. (A similar problem has been documented downstream from the Yali Falls Dam in Vietnam’s Central Highlands). The project is also set to flood about 2000 hectares of protected forest — potentially a worthy long-term sacrifice — but the concerns about water quality, peasant evictions and downstream agricultural impacts could easily tip the scales over into unsustainability.
Like all major dam projects, the Kamchay dam — a project of Sinohydro Co. Ltd., the Chinese state-firm that is building the titanic Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River — poses a familiar development-versus-conservation dilemma, but even after speaking to both environmentalists and engineers I’m not entirely settled on the issue. On the one hand, Cambodia is in dire need of electricity: only 20% of the population has access to reliable power, and blackouts are still a fairly common occurrence in the capital. But on the other, it makes sense that any large-scale project should meet certain benchmark environmental standards. For long-term infrastructural projects especially — Kamchay is expected to generate electricity until the end of the century — there’s little harm in taking an extra few months to ensure that all the environmental effects have been accounted for.
When I quizzed some of the engineers at the dam site, they proudly proclaimed that Kamchay will be built to the same ‘high’ standards as the Three Gorges Dam in China, without realizing that for a Westerner this sort of statement is akin to a self-indictment. (The Chinese, whatever their other virtues, are hardly paragons of touchy-feely enviro-activism). At the same time, however, I find it hard to take the moral high-ground over China on environmental issues. As a civilization finally freed from the scourges of war, famine and socialist economic planning, the Chinese arguably have as much right to satisfy their energy needs as the West did its own period of development, and any argument to the contrary is plainly hypocritical: a squawk of self-righteous indignation made from the high perch of fossil-fueled material comfort.
The same applies for the issue of climate change. As economist William Nordhaus observes in his recent book A Question of Balance, the British government’s Stern Review, which envisions drastic restrictions of China’s carbon emissions, would exact unjustifiable short-term costs on the country for relatively modest long-term gains. As Freeman Dyson has paraphrased in the New York Review of Books, the full implementation of Lord Nicholas Stern’s recommendations would impoverish ‘several generations of Chinese citizens… [but] make their descendants only slightly richer.’ The present costs of Stern’s proposed policy are simply not worth the benefits that will accrue in a century’s time; and Nordhaus argues persuasively that an effective carbon trading regime would be both more effective and more economically viable than installing an austere across-the-board carbon cap. Either way, the Chinese government has come out in staunch opposition to the hypocrisy of the Stern Review, claiming that the developed world has an ‘unshirkable responsibility’ to take the first steps to alleviate the effects of climate change. It’s hard to argue with that.
