BANGKOK -- The Moon River is the lifeline of Isan, bringing sustenance to the poorest, most populous part of Thailand. The World Bank identified the Moon, the greatest of the Mekong River's tributaries, as a suitable location for a giant dam, and proceeded to fund a hydropower project that is destroying the traditional way of life in a picturesque river basin of self-sufficient villages.

The Pak Moon Dam is a concrete monstrosity 300 meters wide and 17 meters high. The World Bank provided technical support and loans, which will cost the people of Thailand over $223 million. The electricity-generating facility blocks and regulates the natural flow of the Moon, but it's not been working as well as proponents claimed it would and economists reckon it won't pay for itself, let alone contribute meaningfully or profitably to Thailand's electricity grid (its 1995 output was 0.04 percent of the total).

Failure to deliver what it was supposed to deliver is reason enough to question the wisdom of the bankers and technocrats, since it is ordinary Thai citizens who will eventually have to pick up the tab. But the precipitous decline in fish populations and growing poverty of villagers along the banks of the river is stirring angry protest. By some estimates, the Moon has lost 90 percent of the fish that used to spawn here and once enriched the Mekong downstream in Laos and Cambodia.