Focus on Mekong

Helping preserve the Mekong's cultural heritage.

When the Frenchman Henri Mouhot first saw Cambodia's Ankor Wat in the mid 19th century he marveled that the temple was a rival to "that of Solomon and erected by some Michelangelo" "grander than anything left by Greece or Rome."

Bagan, in Myanmar's central dry zone, is one of the globe's most hidden archeological wonders, rarely visited but with so many temples, pagodas and stupas packed into an 80 square kilometer radius that experts are constantly puzzled by their numbers – 2,100 or 4,400? - the first dating from the 10th century the latest perhaps only a few months old.

Nestling peacefully on the banks of the Mekong River, the old royal Laos capital of Luang Prabang is arguably one of the most beautiful towns in the world with its gentle fusion of 33 Buddhist temples, crumbling French colonial architecture and a stately 19th century pace of life.

The region's natural beauty rivals its monuments. The Mekong River is the main sinew of the region, flowing majestically from the highlands of Tibet through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam to the South China Sea 4,800 kilometers away.

It is the world's 12th largest river, but maybe more importantly it is home to the largest inland fishing industry in the world and supports an incredible 1,300 fish varieties including the endangered Irrawaddy dolphins and giant catfish. New fish and animal species continue to be discovered even today.

The Mekong provides food, drinking water, irrigation, a major transport artery and energy to some 60 million people living in its immediate vicinity and helps support the entire 232 million population spread across the so-called Mekong countries.

As majestic as the region's history and natural wonders are, however, its wars and invasions have often been equally spectacular.

Bagan, for instance, was sacked by the Mongols as early as 1287. The last decades of the 20th century witnessed the deaths of millions of people and the destruction of towns, villages, homes, schools, hospitals and industrial complexes in various wars and the Cambodian genocide.

In the last few years the region has been bouncing along, enjoying, at times, spectacular economic growth, political turmoil and devastating natural disasters including cyclones and terrifying tsunamis.

The Mekong region, because of its proximity and obvious economic and natural wounds, has been a major focus of Japanese foreign assistance for several decades. In 2007 Tokyo announced the Japan-Mekong Region Partnership Program to help expand trade between the two blocs, promote regional integration and tackle common regional issues.

In 2008, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the 10-state Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which incorporates all of the Mekong River countries with the exception of China, agreed to strengthen their cooperation, encouraging further ASEAN and regional cooperation, bolstering the ASEAN secretariat and participating in various conflict prevention and peace building activities.

As evidenced by those agreements, JICA has increasingly recognized the need for a regional approach, whether in Southeast Asia or Africa, particularly in the field of infrastructure to build airports, ports, roads, bridges and power plants.

With Japanese loans, grant aid and technical expertise, the Mekong region is now criss-crossed with a series of strategic north-south, east-west highways which is facilitating additional trade and people movement.

A 1,450-kilometer link between the Myanmar port of Mawlamyaing and Danang in Viet Nam, by way of Thailand and Laos, is almost complete. Already, goods which used to take two weeks by sea between Bangkok and Hanoi now take only three days overland route.  

Roads spur other development and projects. With the opening of the so-called East-West economic corridor linking Myanmar with Viet Nam, special economic zones are being established in the Lao town of Savannkhet to spur industrial growth and JICA is also encouraging plans for tourist expansion in the region.

Helping the region's most vulnerable people

A Japanese-assisted project to widen the highway between the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and its principal port at Hai Phong, helped create an industrial corridor of factories virtually the entire length of the road.

Careful consideration has been taken to eliminate potential bottlenecks along these economic lifelines. Border crossings are an obvious impediment where bureaucratic and administrative procedures in many developing countries can take hours or even days and weeks.

A gleaming new bridge, no matter how prestigious, will be of little economic use if such hurdles persist and though it might be considered the least glamorous of programs, JICA has been encouraging the streamlining of frontier procedures and the training of skilled officials together with infrastructure development.

Airports and ports have received priority including Bangkok's gleaming Suvarnabhumi Intenrational Airport, gateway to millions of visitors each year, airports at Yangon, Vientiane and Ho Chi Minh City and a string of ports ringing the entire region at Hai Phong and Cai Lan in Viet Nam, Sihanoukville Port in Cambodia, Map Ta Phut and Laem Chabang in Thailand and Yangon in Myanmar

If physical infrastructure is the bedrock of economic progress, JICA has been engaged in a myriad of other projects to strengthen cultural, educational, health, economic and judicial systems in line with one of its basic principles of ensuring ‘human security' for millions of the world's most vulnerable people.

The human security concept is that local communities should both participate directly in and receive direct benefit from field projects to allow them to build better lives.

Though regional cooperation and shared infrastructure are key, the five Mekong countries are in different stages of political and economic development and thus have individual priorities.  Thailand has become a so-called ‘medium developed' country with a per capita GDP of some US$3,841 while the other four Mekong nations stand at less than US$1,000.

After years of desperate warfare, Cambodia needed not only virtually its entire infrastructure rebuilt, but also assistance on reconstructing its judiciary system, which JICA participated in.

Though work has been in progress since the mid 1990s to upgrade the country's water supplies, still less than 30% of the population has access to clean and safe water. A new US$30 million project is planned to provide an additional 1.7 million people direct access by 2015.

Rebuilding tourist attractions and infrastructure

Water, too much or too little of it, is also a problem in neighboring Myanmar, one of the world's poorest countries, particularly in the dry zone around Bagan. Working closely with government partners and non-governmental organizations, JICA has helped sink or rehabilitate dozens of new wells in rural villages in addition to reforesting thousands of acres of bare landscape to bring a better standard of living to the one-third of Myanmar's 56 million people who live in the area.

But when Cyclone Nargis struck ferociously in May, 2008, killing at least 130,000 people and submerging huge areas of the country, JICA undertook a series of projects, rushing emergency supplies to the country, helping Yangon clean up its port area of sunken vessels and continuing the replanting of sections of the coast with mangrove trees which help alleviate natural disasters and coastal erosion.

In northern Myanmar Japanese experts are involved in programs to replace opium harvests with other, more acceptable, crops.

To help project the region's culture, Japanese experts have helped in restoration work at Ankor and also in such places as the tiny Vietnamese port of Hoi An. Urban experts spent three years developing a master plan for the future development of Hanoi, just in time for its forthcoming 1,000th anniversary.

Tourism can play a vital role in revitalizing entire regions. But whereas Thailand recently completed one of the most dazzling new airports anywhere, which will act as a gateway for the entire region, Viet Nam's old imperial capital of Hue, which was heavily damaged during the Viet Nam war, has been developing a much more modest, grass-roots program to improve hotel and tourist management and restore its monuments.

In the health field, Japanese financial and expert assistance has helped in the construction of major city hospitals, rural clinics, the training of doctors and nurses and helping lepers and deaf children in Myanmar or disabled people in Viet Nam.

"The rich history of the Mekong region offers encouragement for the future," says Fumio Kikuchi, director general of JICA's Southeast Asia division and a former resident representative in Viet Nam. "There have been major upheavals in the last few decades, but it become clear that despite the current world economic turmoil, with the right encouragement and backing, the Mekong countries have both the natural resources and skilled populations cable of lifting the region onto a new economic and social level."