"Laos shrugs as villagers lose farms to dam reservoir" 2 May 2022

Developers who built Laos’ Nam Khan 3 dam have not compensated farmers who lost crops to rising water in the reservoir, sources living near the dam told RFA. A Lao government official said the displaced villagers were unlikely to get any more money.

The dam, which sits on the Nam Khan River, began operating in 2016, and the villagers were relocated downstream to a newly built resettlement village. While they received money for lost homes, they were never given any compensation or new plots of farmland. Instead, they were told that they could continue to work at their farms upstream from the dam.

But those farms are now flooded. [...]

A Xiengngeun district official confirmed to RFA that the rising water in the reservoir has damaged farmland and trees and caused landslides.

“The dam owner has to investigate and solve these problems, and the district has informed them they should do this,” the official said.

An official at the province’s Energy and Mines Department, however, told RFA that the villagers were not entitled to compensation for flooded farms because the dam owned the land and had allowed the farmers to cultivate it. [...]

The Nam Khan 3 Dam is a 60-megawat dam, designed and constructed by the Sinohydro Corporation of China and owned by the state-run Électricité du Laos, which financed the project by borrowing about $130 million from China’s Exim Bank. [...]

But displaced villagers commonly complain that they are not sufficiently compensated for what they have lost in the name of development.

The energy official said the villagers would not be able to cultivate any of the land near the reservoir without permission. [...]

From the local government’s point of view, the issue of compensation has already been settled, he said. [...]