Ecologists voice alarm over South Korean reclamation project

By Jon Herskovitz Reuters
Published: November 24, 2008

BUAN, South Korea: Seoul is betting that a multibillion-dollar land reclamation project about seven times the size of Manhattan will lift the economy; but environmentalists say it could be one of the country's biggest ecological blunders.
The Saemangeum land reclamation project is using a sea dyke finished several years ago to reclaim an area of 400 square kilometers, or 155 square miles, turning coastal tidelands that are key feeding areas for globally threatened birds into factories, golf courses and water treatment plants.
"This project is not about protecting the environment," said Park Hyoung Bae, an official with the Saemangeum development authority. "It is about economic development. And we will do that in an environmentally sound way."
The authority said that the $3-billion project will bring industry to North Jeolla, a province that has been the agricultural breadbasket of the country but lacks modern industrialization.
Developers are planning to start construction of an industrial zone next year, offering sweeteners like free land leases for 100 years for selected industries and a free economic zone that offers tax breaks to attract foreign investors, who can stay in a village planned just for them.

They will replace natural wetlands with artificial ones and turn riverbeds into lakes. They will build a park along the road on the sea dyke and try to attract tourists with a theme park, convention center and even perhaps a casino.
The province, which runs from the middle of South Korea to the west coast, is dotted with small farms that grow grain and raise pigs, boasts a mid-sized port that serves China across the Yellow Sea and is home to the historic city of Jeonju, once the capital of an ancient Korean kingdom.
South Korea originally began the project for the estuary decades ago, when its economy was struggling, food was short and reclamation seemed like a good way to increase farm land in the mountainous and cramped country. The area is about 200 kilometers, or 125 miles, south of Seoul.
After years of legal wrangling and changes in how to use the land, construction started on the project in 1999 with hundreds of thousands of boulders the size of compact cars dumped into the Yellow Sea estuary to form the dyke, which was completed in 2006.
Area farmers have questioned the need for the project, saying there is no one left to work the land due to a population drop while major domestic industry has often stayed away due to a lack of infrastructure.
Critics said the project stayed alive due to bureaucratic inertia and because it created construction jobs in the area that has provided the strongest political support for left-leaning presidents who governed from 1998 to 2008.
President Lee Myung Bak, who used to run Hyundai's construction arm, has also thrown his support to the project, saying it will help regional development and stimulate his country's export-driven economy that is on the ropes due to the global slowdown.
"Saemangeum's ecological importance seems to be more valued abroad," said Yoon Sang Hoon of the conservation group Green Korea.
"The government is calling this environmentally friendly, but just planting a few trees that have since died does not make it a green project," Yoon said.
Wetlands like Saemangeum help in flood control, prevent soil erosion and can remove, as well as store, greenhouse gases from the Earth's atmosphere, according the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Migratory birds travelling between Russia and Alaska in the north, to New Zealand and Australia in the south, congregate for a refueling stop on the Yellow Sea tidal flats.
A study released last month by two conservation groups, Birds Korea and Australasian Wader Studies Group, recorded a decline of 137,000 shorebirds, and declines in 19 of the most numerous species, from 2006 to 2008 at Saemangeum.
"We anticipate the declines will not only continue but become more obvious in other species," said Nial Moores, a British-born conservationist and director of Birds Korea.