Mekong River Commission

The comparative assessment undertaken here does not pretend to be an economic study of the costs and benefits of the annual Mekong flood. It is simply a statement of the degree to which the benefits exceed the costs by a very large margin, a fact not widely recognised. Many working assumptions have had to be made, so the figures should not be taken as definitive. Rather they should be seen in comparative rather than absolute terms.

To take these results any further would require a data base that is simply not available. Although a reasonable estimate of the total regional flood damage and losses over the last decade can be achieved this is not the case with regard to the benefit data. The major component of the overall financial benefit of the flood is the annual value of the Mekong fishery. The linkage to the annual flood is clear since the seasonal inundation of the flood plain in Cambodia provides a huge biomass for fish reproduction and growth. However, accurate year on year catch value figures for the fishery are not available. Only the annual dai fishery catch is monitored and this refers to just one element of the regional fishery and in fact to just one fishing gear type, namely the ‘bag net’. This lack of data prescribes any incremental assessment of the benefits and losses of the flood.