"Toxic tide: Myanmar’s rare earth mining surge hurting livelihoods along Thailand’s Kok River", 12 April 2026

… The silence along the Kok River is the fallout from a toxic surge upstream. While the river should run clear, it is now thick and cloudy with sediment, industrial run-off and heavy metals amid a boom in unregulated, China-backed rare earth mining …

Driven by the global race for the highly strategic minerals, this cross-border contamination is poisoning Thailand’s waterways, crippling its tourism and leaving downstream communities to pay the price for a high-stakes geopolitical rivalry…

But over the past year, researchers and policy analysts have pointed to mounting evidence of a surge in unregulated rare earth and gold mining across the border in Myanmar as a major source of contamination, releasing heavy metals and toxic run-off into the Kok River, …

The surge in mining has been fuelled in part by the instability following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, which has weakened oversight in border regions and allowed illicit operations to proliferate.

At the same time, China’s voracious appetite to extend its global supply chain dominance in rare earths – the strategic minerals used in everything from electric vehicles to defence technology – has incentivised rapid extraction…

… On the ground, Thai university researchers have detected heavy metal contamination exceeding safety standards across the Kok River basin, with arsenic readings more than double Thailand’s national standard of 0.01mg per litre.

… China relies heavily on Myanmar’s rich deposits of heavy rare earths to complement its own supply to meet global industrial demand, especially as Beijing tightens environmental restrictions on mining within its own borders.

… In any event, he added, the public reaction to the news of the river pollution was having a much more pressing impact on his immediate livelihood…

Siam said the upstream Chinese construction of giant hydropower dams along the upper Mekong, or Lancang River, has led to fluctuating water levels and a 70 per cent fall in the fish population in his area…