Wednesday May 4, 2022
Radio Free Asia —
Developers who built Laos’ Nam Khan 3 dam have not compensated farmers who lost crops to rising water in the reservoir, sources living near the dam told RFA. A Lao government official said the displaced villagers were unlikely to get any more money.
The dam, which sits on the Nam Khan River, began operating in 2016, and the villagers were relocated downstream to a newly built resettlement village. While they received money for lost homes, they were never given any compensation or new plots of farmland. Instead, they were told that they could continue to work at their farms upstream from the dam.
But those farms are now flooded.
“The dam owner recently made a survey. When they close the waterway, the water in the reservoir is on the rise and floods the villagers’ farmland,” a villager living near the dam in the province’s Xieng Ngeun district in the northern part of the country told RFA’s Lao Service on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.