The following article was sent to VNNews-L by Stephen Denney.
HEADLINE: Elevated Highway to Plough Through Vietnam National Park
DATELINE: Hanoi
Copyright 2000 Deutsche Presse-Agentur, November 3, 2000
Vietnam’s most-prized national park is likely to be split in two by an elevated roadway on the controversial 1,800 kilometre Ho Chi Minh Highway, authorities said Friday.
The construction of a three- to five-kilometre overpass through Cuc Phuong National Park, which was inaugurated in the
1960s by communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh himself, is virtually assured, the Ministry of Transport said.
“Most of the engineers and experts we consulted seemed to favour the elevated road option,” an official in the ministry’s planning department told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Two other options, a ground-level road through the preserve and a bypass around it, have been virtually dismissed, according
to the official, who asked not to be identified.
The bypass through 30 kilometres of swampland would prove more costly than the 14 million dollar overpass and would
“negatively impact local residents in the area,” the official said.
The comments came in the wake of a front-page report in Thursday’s Saigon Times Daily that quoted highway management unit officials as saying the planned overpass was “almost agreed”.
No official announcement has been made, but it is acknowledged that media stories of such sensitivity require advance approval from high levels of Vietnam’s communist leadership.
The road will slice through jungle along the famed Ho Chi Minh Trail, the war-era transport route used to shuttle millions of
troops and tons of materiel from the communist north to battle theatres in the south during the Vietnam War.
A total of 10 protected areas will be affected.
Cuc Phuong officials complained they were left out of the decision-making process.
“We are never informed, let alone consulted, about what is going to be done to the park,” said Tran Quang Bich, Cuc Phuong’s deputy director.
“An elevated road would have grave negative impact on the ecology of the park,” Bich said. He noted that the park
management staff has submitted to the politburo its own proposal for a bypass but has received no reply.
Cuc Phuong is Vietnam’s first national park and is considered a biodiversity hotspot.
The highway — Vietnam’s second north-south artery — is the most ambitious infrastructure project ever for the impoverished nation.
Construction of phase one, set to cost 378.6 million dollars, began this year amid a swirl of nationalism and conservationist
controversy.
The highway, which Hanoi claims will open up remote western regions to economic development, is a deadly blow to
Vietnam’s infantile environmental movement, conservation groups have said.
They have also expressed concern that international standard environmental impact assessments — required under international conventions as well as Vietnam’s own laws for such large projects — have not been performed or released for public comment.
Such surveys are required if donors such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank are to provide funding for the
project.
To date, international donors are not involved in the project, though a Cuban firm is involved in consultation and construction.
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