Aid and development
Development policy and administration
Forum raises urgent Mekong issues
The 7th Mekong River Commission (MRC) Regional Stakeholder Forum was held in Lao capital Vientiane over Monday and Tuesday, with participants discussing urgent issues facing the Mekong region, the Secretariat of the MRC has said. Attending the two-day event were 180 representatives from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, ...
Ry Sochan
New MRC Secretariat CEO lists top priorities for Mekong basin
Mekong River Commission Secretariat CEO An Pich Hatda is the first Cambodian to hold the position. Appointed by the MRC Ministerial Council last year, Mr Pich Hatda says he wants to bring the interest of every single member country to the table while elevating the MRC Secretariat’s ...
Sustaining the heartbeat of the Mekong Basin
The Mekong has another point of origin: the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia. Each year life springs from the lake, mostly in the form of a massive fish population that migrates to the far reaches of the Mekong system both upstream and downstream. This annual ...
Brian Eyler, Courtney Weatherby
The Hidden Environmental Toll of Mining the World’s Sand
By far the largest mining endeavor globally is digging up sand, mainly for the concrete that goes into buildings. But this little-noticed and largely unregulated activity has serious costs — damaging rivers, wreaking havoc on coastal ecosystems, and even wiping away entire islands. In Cambodia, researching ...
Brexit could put 1.7 million people around globe into extreme poverty
It’s a long way from Whitehall and Brussels, but a study has found that the developing country that will be hardest hit by Brexit is the south-east Asian nation of Cambodia. With the deadline to reach a Brexit agreement looming in March, much attention has been given to ...
Mekong-Korea cooperation spearheads sustainable development
Ahead of the inaugural Mekong-Republic of Korea Summit and ASEAN-ROK Commemorative Summit next year, the two sides can benefit together by tackling the development challenges of the future, according to a group of experts at the sixth Mekong-ROK Business Forum on Dec. 13 in Seoul. “Korea ...
Lancang-Mekong Cooperation could play bigger role in regional river protection, development
Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) could play a bigger role in the protection and development of the Lancang-Mekong river, Cambodian experts and officials said in recent interviews with Xinhua. Te Navuth, secretary general of the Cambodia National Mekong Committee (CNMC), said that for Cambodia, the main concerns over ...
Dams and sand mining threaten integrity of lower Mekong
At more than 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles), the Mekong is Southeast Asia’s longest river. It runs through six countries, providing food and income for more than 70 million people. But the integrity of the river, and therefore of the livelihood of the people who depend on ...
The other side of the Mekong development debate
China’s Mekong development plan has stirred debate as potentially becoming an environmental and social peril for downstream Mekong countries. The country’s navigation channel improvement plan has recently attracted attention from environmentalists, activists, and the media alike.The pace has picked up since the middle of this ...
Phan Tuan Phan (CEO, MRC)
World Bank Appoints New Director for Region
The World Bank has appointed a new director for Cambodia, Burma and Laos, it said in a media statement on Tuesday. Ellen Goldstein, a 30-year veteran at the bank and previously the director for the West Balkans and earlier for Bangladesh and Nepal, will be ...