Balang Dam
This is a picture of a nine hundred year-old dam with a very big breach in it; a breach that has brought a lot of suffering to almost 20,000 people.
The rulers of Angkor did not just build temples. They also built very large-scale irrigation systems centered on dams like this one. Tens of thousands of slave laborers heaped earth to create the walls of reservoirs that were relatively shallow, but very long and wide - this dam held a reservoir seven kilometers long. Angkor’s economy was based on rice, and her irrigation system enabled three rice harvests every year. One rice harvest per annum means subsistence; two mean profit. Three and you can pay for Angkor Wat.
Remarkably, people in this area - Balang Commune - were able to maintain the dam for almost a thousand years and consistently produce two rice harvests every year, if not three.
Then in the 1970s civil war and famine came to Cambodia. To supplement their diet, local people began to drill holes in the dam to help them catch fish from the reservoir. This was not a good idea. In 1994 the dam broke, and about one thousand families in Balang Commune were thrown back one thousand years, to one rice harvest per annum, subsistence, and poverty. Two neighboring communes were also affected - almost 20,000 people in all. They made several attempts to repair the dam, but it was beyond them.
Mean Someth, a Buddhist monk at Wat Phreah Enkosa in Siem Reap, is trying to rebuild the Balang dam. He and ten of his fellow monks started an NGO called Human Resource and Natural Development, or HRND. With a budget of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year, they have developed several successful education and training programs to alleviate poverty in Balang and to deal with its effects - poor healthcare, drug abuse, domestic violence, and more. The best solution would be to fix the dam. But that would cost $60,000.
So why can’t 20,000 people come up $60,000?
The people in Balang are regarded as very poor even by other Cambodians; and the average income in Cambodia is less than $1 per day.
Families typically own a hectare of land - why don’t they borrow against that? Like 80% of the land in Cambodia, theirs is not registered. No title, no capital. And while international organizations have helped Cambodia set up a land registry, most people can’t afford the miscellaneous transaction costs that the staff demand.
Why doesn’t the government finance this project?
Probably because it is too expensive in terms of dollars per vote. For $10,000 they can build a road that is highly visible to a hundred thousand people, whatever its real economic value. It’s not as if this never happens in the US.
They could borrow against future income. What about the World Bank, and in particular the Asia Development Bank?
I suspect that this is too small. The World Bank won’t lend you $60,000 for the same reason that your local branch of Bank of America won’t lend you $60. I may be wrong about this.
Ah, what about microcredit? Like Grameen Bank? I suspect that this is too big. That suggests a form of market failure, and again I may be wrong. There certainly aren’t enough potential sources of credit.
Summer and I have made a contribution to the Balang dam project through Humantranslation.org, the charity that introduced us to Mean Someth. If you’d like to do so, there’s a PayPal link here. Specify that it’s for the dam project. (It’s a very new charity without a full range of payment systems yet; if you don’t have a PayPal account, get in touch with me directly.) And if you have any other suggestions about how to finance projects like this - market-friendly or market-distorting - please let me know.