Foreword
What is the link between Cambodian sand dredgers along the banks of the Mekong River, urban farmers in Phnom Penh who are witnessing a drastic reduction in lake and wetland areas, and the Vietnamese farmers of the Mekong Delta who are turning away from rice-growing to migrate to Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s economic capital, in search of a better life? Or between Laotian workers in the mining industry in Xaysomboun Province, and the peasant farmers of the mountainous provinces in northern Thailand, who are increasingly dependent on the expansion of corn monoculture in the hands of multinational firms? Not to mention the Ta’ang tea farmers in Myanmar faced with the rollout strategy for a new economic development corridor on the Chinese border? All these examples relate to one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century: the joint acceleration of inequalities and environmental damage. Recent studies have shown that this challenge exists all around the world, but the Mekong River Basin provides an ideal illustration (Islam and Winkel, 2017; Hamann et al., 2018). The region is home to an ethnic mosaic of more than 250 million people, following the river as it runs through the Indochinese peninsula, exposed to a full range of climate and environmental upheavals. If proof were needed, the COVID-19 crisis reminds us of the extent to which ecological destruction can lead to healthcare inequalities and socioeconomic crises. Conversely, it also shows us how inequalities are themselves a major obstacle to the social cohesion that is necessary to undertake ecological reconstruction.
The integrative role of the Mekong River
This is especially true in Southeast Asia and in particular in the following five countries of the Mekong which form an original geographical entity: Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Three forms of shared landscape stand out in the Mekong Basin. First, the highland range in Southeast Asia which was recently given the name Zomia by anthropologist James Scott (2010). This is a shared mountainous area, home to a great number of ethnic groups. With territories at altitudes above 300 meters, highland populations here have resisted all state authority for centuries. Second, the Mekong River originates in the foothills of the Himalayas in China and flows through the basin. Historically, it is on the meanders of this river at the foot of the
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