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Trade turns Mekong into a river of plenty
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In a small village in the north of Thailand, about an hour's drive outside
Chiang Mai,
the farmers are happily surprised at what happened with the garlic they
cultivated in the dry season, from November to April.
The crop this year attracted prices of 30 baht to 40 baht, or about 75 cents
to $1 , per kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, double the price of previous years.
As so often in this part of the world, the answer lay in China, hundreds of
kilometers to the north.
Thanks to expanded port facilities along the Mekong River, and a free trade
pact between Thailand and China, fruit and vegetables from China often make
Thai production uneconomic. This year, however, local Thai officials say
they think that floods destroyed a lot of garlic in China, cutting the
imports from there.
The expanded docks and offices at Chiang Saen in northern Thailand mean that
such changes in trade patterns affect lives more immediately than ever
before. Chinese garlic, onions, cabbages, fruit and much more now dominate
supermarkets across Southeast Asia, partly because of those enlarged ports
along the Mekong.
Five years ago, Chiang Saen was a sleepy town, its ancient city walls and
temples attracting the occasional tourist. Now the waterfront is heaving.
Chinese restaurants appear seemingly overnight, and shipping agency offices
are mushrooming, as are tree- shaded benches for laborers. They need a break
from the otherwise constant loading of ships plying the Mekong to and from
China.
The ships are distinctive, with portraits of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiao- ping
in some captains' cabins. Chinese wives and children are busy on the upper
deck, hanging out the washing, playing with water, oblivious to the sweating
crowds below. At ground level, Chinese bosses oversee gangs of workers who
are Thai, Burmese or hill-tribe men, shouting a cacophony of languages and
taking a quick nip from bottles hidden in cloth shoulder bags when they can.
Loading is still carried out by human sweat and ingenuity, as boxes of fruit
slide down planks into ships' holds. Officials say that 200 million baht of
goods passes through Chiang Saen annually, but putting accurate numbers on
this trade is difficult.
New numbers recently produced by researchers in Chiang Mai, working under
the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, showed that imports from China
through Chiang Saen more than doubled to 1.22 billion baht in 2005 from
592.4 million baht in 2003. Exports through Chiang Saen rose to 3.86 billion
baht in 2005 from 3.31 billion baht in 2003.
Some of the changes are duplicated farther along the Mekong at Chiang Khong,
another historic town finding new life as a river port. Although affected by
the burgeoning China trade, Chiang Khong handles more of the direct trade
across the river to Laos.
Chiang Saen has reaped the benefits from China's blasting of rapids in the
Mekong. That has allowed ships of a deeper draft to make the one-day or
two-day journey upriver from Chiang Saen into Sipsong Panna, or
Xishuangbanna, in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. China's
Mekong trade ports include Jinghong, Menghan and Guanlei.
"I was skeptical about the river route from China," said Andrew Walker,
author of "The Legend of the Golden Boat," a 1999 examination of trade
patterns across the borders of Thailand, Laos, China and Myanmar. After all,
Dutch, French, Thai and Chinese have been trying for hundreds of years to
make the Mekong navigable.
"The key development since then is that the river traffic has become much
busier," said Walker, who is a fellow at the Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies at Australian National University. "China's blasting of the
rapids north of Chiang Saen has facilitated far more ship arrivals and
greater trade."
Trade between Thailand and Laos, from Chiang Khong to Luang Prabang, has
intensified old trading links and continued longstanding patterns, Walker
said. But the "large-scale river trade down from China is fundamentally
new," he said. "This Thai-China shipping is an order of magnitude bigger
than anything before."
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