There are few places in Southeast Asia more remote than this forested plateau in southern Laos, but over the decades, history seems to have chosen it as a battleground. During the Vietnam War, it was busy with the movement of Vietnamese troops heading down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and it became one of the most heavily bombed places on earth.

These days it thunders to the dynamite of dam builders and the roar of construction equipment, some of it widening and paving parts of the wartime trail just inside the border with Vietnam.For more than a decade, long before construction began last year, the project has been the focus of a different kind of battle, which reflects the region s economic transformation since the war. It is under vigorous attack from opponents concerned about the destructive effects of dams, both on the balance of nature and on the surrounding population.

Now that it is well under way, critics say a number of important questions about those effects remain to be answered. About 6,000 people will be displaced on the Nakai Plateau, which will be partly flooded, and the livelihoods of at least 100,000 more will be affected downstream. Those numbers are small compared with an estimated one million people who have been displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, which has just begun operations in China.

The dam in Laos, called the Nam Theun 2, has become a test case, the first major dam backed by the World Bank after a self-imposed moratorium in the mid-1990 s because of the concern over the environmental and human impact of big dams. Together with its partner in the project, the Asian Development Bank, it is trying hard to prove that it can meet the social and environmental standards set by its critics.

"If they fail, they will have an identity crisis and will have to rethink their development model," said Jean Foerster, the social and environmental director for the Nam Theun 2 Power Company, which is carrying out the project. When it is completed four years from now, the dam, on a tributary of the Mekong River, will address two pressing needs. It will feed electricity to energy-hungry Thailand, its far more developed neighbor to the east, and it will instantly become a major source of cash for Laos, one of the poorest countries in Asia.

For the first 25 years of operation, until the dam is turned over entirely to local control, the government will earn an estimated $2 billion. "The sustainable development of hydropower is one of the few options the country has for long-term growth and for further reducing poverty," said Haruhiko Kuroda, president of the Asian Development Bank, when the two banks agreed to finance the project last year.

Some critics question even those basic goals, saying Thailand could find other, less disruptive, sources of power and warning that the Laotian government cannot be counted on to use its windfall as promised, for social and economic development. Supporters say no other dam project has taken such pains to mitigate potential destructive effects. Hundreds of studies have been carried out over the years, examining everything from annual flood patterns to hardy forms of grass for grazing. "We have recorded all the people having one banana tree," said Bernard Tribollet, the chief executive officer of the Nam Theun 2 Power Company, describing the thoroughness of the research.

Even if the project falls short of its goals, the developers say, it is a better option than the more destructive, full-throttle approach of countries like China, India and Vietnam. They say that if they were not damming the Nam Theun River, one of those countries might well be doing it in their place with little regard for the environment or population. For a project of that magnitude, though, experimentation, uncertainty and trial-and-error appear to be playing a significant role. The livelihoods of displaced villagers, the effects on downstream rivers, the protection of wildlife and the role of the government are all, despite the years of study, still works in progress.

"The main issues we are concerned about are the social impact, the environmental impact and then the overall costs and benefits for the people of Laos and the ability of the government of Laos to manage a project as complex and risky as Nam Theun 2," said Aviva Imhof, campaigns director of the International Rivers Network, a private monitoring group that opposes dams. "Construction is proceeding on deadline," she said after a two-week visit to the area. "But the social and environmental measures are lagging." That is the nature of the dam-building business, said Mr. Tribollet, the projects chief executive. Certainty is impossible when man steps in so ambitiously to reconfigure nature and social structures.

"The essence of a project is a series of problems," he said in an interview at the dam site. "And the success of the project is dealing with these problems one after another. You are going to have problems. You deal with them one after another." So even as the builders blast tunnels through the rock and prepare the ground for the 130-foot-high dam, the Nakai Plateau has swarmed with carpenters and social workers, agronomists and anthropologists, foresters and hydrologists, aquaculturists and geomorphologists.

As bridges, diversion channels and a huge power station take shape, new villages are being built away from the flood zone, and the slash-and-burn farmers who must move into less fertile areas are being taught how to grow cabbage, how to sell it, how to diversify their crops and how to handle the money they earn. It is a huge challenge in social and economic engineering, said Mr. Foerster, the social and environmental director. "They have to adapt to new livelihoods in a smaller area," he said. "It s not something we can do immediately. Its too much of a jump from their current lifestyle."

He added: "Relocating a village is not only relocating houses and digging wells. Thats the easy part. Then you have to think about schools, agriculture, forestry, cattle-raising. With this project you can address almost all the parameters of the country." As the challenges have multiplied, so too have the uncertainties. On the plateau, they include the quality of farmland for the displaced villagers, the suitability of grazing land for water buffalo and whether alternative crops and sustainable fish farms can be developed, Ms. Imhof said.

Downstream, she said, there are questions about the impact of erosion and changed currents on fisheries and farming, and about compensation for the loss of homes and livelihoods. Even if those issues are resolved, Ms. Imhof said, "You can t pretend that this project is not in Laos" — a country of just six million people that has never encountered an enterprise of that scope. The builders biggest gamble is their partnership with a government that has a reputation for deep corruption and that lacks expertise to handle many of the financial and social aspects of the project. The developers acknowledge that uncertainty as well.

"The beginning part is we have to trust the government to want to do the right thing," said WooChong Um, principal operations specialist for the Asian Development Bank. "Thats why we are in there, to help them do what they should do. There s a capacity issue involved. There s a huge degree of uncertainty."

As the project seeks to soften the impacts on the people, the wildlife, the rivers and the surrounding landscape, he said: "Its really about choices. Its really about risks." If the Nam Theun 2 project succeeds in meeting these challenges, he said, "it will send a huge signal to other countries that this kind of project is workable."
(Por Seth Mydans,The NY Times, 26/06/2006)