Poverty and how to overcome it dominates the political agenda in Laos. The preferred remedy is to build dams to generate electricity for sale to Thailand.

The decade-long battle over the building of the Nam Theun 2 project has been waged   within the context of poverty alleviation. Last week, the World Bank decided to support the project despite incomplete studies and warnings of ecological and social damage on a grand scale.

Poverty, whether real or imagined, has made the building of Nam Theun 2 dam inevitable. But the argument has had the effect of stigmatising rural life and repressing cultural diversity in a country which is predominantly rural and self-sufficient.

The history of Nam Theun 2 is characterised by an attempt to degrade the rural Lao's identity and way of life.

Consultation workshops organised by the World Bank on three continents have convinced rich countries that Nam Theun 2 will raise the poor standard of living of Laos. The workshops played up the poverty of Laos- the low income, lack of health-care and high mortality rate - through photographs of ethnic minorities wearing little better than rags and living in basic shacks in the remote countryside.

Yet, there is a political economy embedded in the poverty discourse. It begs the question of whose poverty. In other words, who gets what and who stands to lose when it comes to generating and distributing the revenue from Nam Theun 2?

The Lao people and ethnic peasants will suffer the indignity  and loss of being uprooted from their homes and forests, of losing their river and of seeing their culture and livelihood destroyed. In return, they will receive the gifts of development, ranging from housing to a water pump to irrigate their land, a fish pond, jobs as forest guards, farm labourers or construction workers on the dam.

There has been hardly any protest from rural peasants, whom the official discourse classifies as ''others and helpless poor, contemptible with substandard living conditions''. Their pride in their culture, their dignity as skilled and self-reliant human beings, their traditional resource management system and their sense of freedom and security has been ignored. They were erased completely from the pages of the cost benefit analysis of Nam Theun 2.

The bottom line is whether Nam Theun 2 will create poverty or eradicate it. The experience of dams and resettlement in Thailand provides some useful indicators. Debt and new diseases such as malaria, sexually-transmitted diseases and stress have followed the construction of all dams.

As the impact of Nam Theun 2 unfolds in the years to come, debt and dam-induced disease, on top of the collapse of cultures, will become the benchmark contradicting the project's rhetoric of poverty alleviation.

Technology of power

How was Nam Theun 2 accepted given all the unanswered social and ecological questions and the absence of a democratic civic culture in Laos? This required a form of technology: the image shapers. The political economy of technology asks the question: Whose voice is legitimised, and whose silenced?

Contributing have been consultants, conservationists, social scientists and anthropologists -hired guns who produce official documents about the project's benefits and create the illusion of freedom of speech in Laos under a pretext of local consultation.

Drowning the Nakai Plateau forest, home to one of the world's last remaining biodiversity hot spots, and displacing thousands of forest dwellers is justified as a necessary trade-off. The dam consortium will finance the conservationists' dream plan of protected area management in a ''better piece of forest in the watershed area adjacent to the reservoir''.

Social scientists prescribe aquaculture to replace the present wild-capture fishery of the Xe Bang Fai river. Turning one of Laos' great rivers into a drain-pipe attached to the Nam Theun 2 generator is regarded as a benefit rather than a cost. The increased water level, they claim, will irrigate the residents' farmland and bring income. The effects of ruining the river's ecosystem and drowning the history and culture along the river course are never mentioned.

Local consultation was another ploy. It consisted of preparing the affected people to believe the dam builders' promises of a better life. The government was determined to go ahead with Nam Theun 2 and denied villagers any possibility of criticism or making an informed decision.

The framework available to them was that their future was at the mercy of the dam. What the consultation experts called ''freedom of speech'' was a whimper from those affected which the experts used to design mitigation measures.

Consultation in this sense does not enable the affected to think about their right to define how their resources should be used. Rather, it helps to move them to see sacrifice, rather than justice, as necessary. It seduces the public into believing that the villagers and the Lao government, as an ally of the dam builders, are equal players in a country where freedom of expression is non-existent.

Decolonising professions

The planning of the Nam Theun 2 project was a tool for foreign experts, mostly of Western origin, to exert authority over local affairs. The misuse of professional knowledge in the interest of the dam builders and at the expense of local livelihoods resembles the well-known relationship of colonisers and anthropologists in the past.

Anthropologists have been criticised as being agents of colonialism, writing about indigenous cultures only to serve the colonial administration. By the same token, the professionals working on Nam Theun 2 have produced documents to legitimise the transfer of resources from local users to international dam builders.

It is unfortunate that the Nam Theun 2 planning process has not benefited from the well-documented World Commission on Dam's work. What is important about the WCD is not so much its guidelines as the process that provides a mechanism for opposing parties to participate at all levels in the study process.

The WCD's study on the Pak Moon dam in Ubon Ratchathani has been studied by and influences both pro- and anti-dam groups - from the selection of consultants and the setting of the terms of reference to the review of the consultants' reports. This offers a form of dialogue between the pro- and anti-dam groups in deciding the consultant members, and then between the consultants and the opposing parties on what is written and what is not.

The accountability of the professionals producing the Nam Theun 2 documents was not an issue at all. The consultants are either employees of or were handpicked by the World Bank and the dam consortiums. All were writing and compiling reports for their sponsors. Conservationist groups worked from the perspective of keeping the pristine forest free of human disturbance. They were writing from professional self-interest.

The loss of faith in the professionals is reflected in the growth of community research on Thai rivers. Starting with the Pak Moon research by local people, community research is an attempt by villagers to document resources and local river management on their own terms, rejecting the monopoly of expert studies which shape decisions that affect their lives.

Dam projects are always politicised in democratic societies as they create advantaged and disadvantaged, winners and losers. In communist Laos, the complete lack of civil groups means the voice of the losers can never be heard.

There are groups of foreign non-government organisations, academics and researchers both inside and outside Laos with vast knowledge of Laos' cultural diversity and local communities. But these groups prefer to remain uncritical and silent for fear of evoking the wrath of the Lao government and being denied access to fieldwork. The prospect of defending local livelihoods in the face of modernisation in Laos is grim indeed.

In a similar vein, the Thai public have been kept in the dark about the export of our environmental and social problems to Laos for the sake of our economic prosperity. Our lifestyle and the urbanisation of the Northeast will be made possible by the cheap and unlimited supply of electricity from Laos. And the Lao rural population will pay the price.

How far Laos has come from its colonial past is debatable. Laos was once a vassal state of Siam and a colony of France, and today it is providing electricity to its sole customer and its partners in Nam Theun 2 in much the same way. As Nam Theun 2 shows, Laos is willingly to offer its precious natural resources and sacrifice the well being of its people to the production of cheap electricity for Thai consumers and to generate revenues for the French utility and a few Thai companies.

Malee Traisawasdichai Lang is a PhD candidate at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. Her research is supported by DANIDA and the Danish Development  Research Council. She was an environment journalist and author of the ''Mekong Watch'' column.