Flooding has damaged many FCOPI homes

The cause of all (most) wars? Someone’s pissing in your river! In the old movie, “The Man Who Would Be King,” two British soldiers desert the army in India during the 1870’s and cross the Himalayas into Afghanistan. They find themselves in a city that is fighting a battle with the city upstream, they can’t figure out what is going on, when another deserter, an Indian national, explains, “These guys are pissing in the river before the water gets to us.”

Then they find out they are also fighting a battle with the city downstream from them. Why? “Because we are pissing in the river before it gets to them.” It’s not exactly a ‘pissing contest’ that is causing our problems, it’s the damn dams!

Everyone loves, cheap, clean, renewable energy, but Cambodia has a problem, we’re downstream from China, Laos and most of Vietnam. These countries are damming up the tributaries of the Mekong as fast as they can buy concrete. They want to fill their reservoirs so that they are full in order to generate electricity and irrigate their fields during the dry season. So? Our fields and rivers dry up because we have no water during the dry season, and then when we get deluges like we have for the past month, they open up the sluice gates to keep the dams from bursting and like a giant toilet flush, guess who gets submerged?

Our floods? Its at least partially a dam problem and there is damn little we can do about it, except pray.