THA TON, Thailand: For most of her life, 59-year-old farmer Tip Kamlue has irrigated her fields in northern Thailand with the waters of the Kok River, which flows down from neighbouring Myanmar before joining with the Mekong River that cuts through Southeast Asia.
But since April, after authorities warned residents to stop using the Kok’s water because of concerns over contamination, Tip has been using groundwater to grow pumpkins, garlic, sweet corn and okra.
“It’s like half of me has died,” Tip said, standing by her fields in Tha Ton sub-district, and looking out at the river that she is now forced to shun.
Across mainland Southeast Asia, more than 2,400 mines – many of them illegal and unregulated – could be releasing deadly chemicals such as cyanide and mercury into river water, according to research from the United States-based Stimson Center think tank released on Monday (Nov 24).
“The scale is something that’s striking to me,” said Brian Eyler, senior fellow at Stimson, pointing to scores of tributaries of major rivers, like the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy that are probably highly contaminated.
The Stimson report marks the first comprehensive study of potentially polluting mines in mainland Southeast Asia. Researchers analysed satellite imagery to identify mining activity including 366 alluvial mining sites, 359 heap leach sites and 77 rare earth mines draining into the Mekong basin.
Most alluvial mining sites are gold mines, though some also extract tin and silver. Heap leach mining sites include those for gold, nickel, copper, and manganese extraction.
The Mekong is Asia’s third-largest river and supports the livelihood of more than 70 million people as well as the global export of farm and fisheries products. It was previously perceived to be a clean river system, said Eyler.
“Because so much of the Mekong Basin is essentially ungoverned by national laws and sensible regulations, the basin is unfortunately ripe for this kind of unregulated activity to occur at a high level of intensity and the huge scale that our data reveals,” he said.
The toxic chemicals released through unregulated rare earths mining include ammonium sulphate, and sodium cyanide and mercury that are used for two different types of gold mining, according to Stimson researchers.
That exposes not only the millions of people who live along the Mekong in Southeast Asia to health risks, but also consumers elsewhere.
“There is not a major supermarket in the US that doesn’t have products from the Mekong Basin, including shrimp, rice and fish,” said Eyler.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/toxic-mines-southeast-asia-rivers-thailand-5486201
