Commercial Navigation on the Upper Mekong: Growing or Slowing for Thailand?

This paper, funded by the Australian Government through the Mekong-Australia Partnership, examines the trajectory of commercial navigation on the Upper Mekong River, primarily through the perspective of Thailand. The 25 years in question are categorized and addressed via three eras: 2000–2008; 2009–2019; and 2020–2025. The paper finds that commercial navigation on the Upper Mekong—spurred by post-Cold War optimism and facilitated by the 2001 Agreement on Commercial Navigation of the Lancang-Mekong River—grew quickly but from a low baseline during the first era. The era was best known for the Upper Mekong Navigation Improvement Project, which was promoted and funded by China and deepened and widened the river through a combination of blasting and dredging.

Commercial navigation peaked during the second era, symbolized by the completion in 2013 of Thailand’s Chiang Saen port, even as road and rail projects began to catch up to the river as a means of transporting cargo. Thailand’s exports began to greatly exceed its imports, but overall cargo tonnage on the river increased. During the third era, commercial navigation recovered from its near-stoppage at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to pre-pandemic levels, but it was also overtaken by road and rail networks further connecting Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and China. The paper concludes that a new trend of plateaued riverine trade, against accelerated commercial road and rail transport—multimodal connectivity with the Mekong utilized the least—is taking shape and set to continue in the years ahead.