South Korea's Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of continuing construction.
By James Card | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

BYEONSAN PENINSULA, SOUTH KOREA – South Korea's biggest conservation battle ended Thursday as the Supreme Court ruled in favor of continuing construction on the controversial Saemangeum sea wall, which when completed will become the longest in the world.

The massive $3.58 billion project aims to convert some 99,000 acres of tidal wetlands into landfill and a reservoir by putting the area behind a 20-mile wall that will block the tide and dam the Dongjin and Mangyeung Rivers that flow into the shallow estuary.

Environmental groups have decried the wall as one of Asia's greatest ecological catastrophes. Saemangeum Bay serves as a key staging site for shore birds and is a crucial feeding area for migratory birds of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. The destruction of this habitat, environmentalists warn, will affect bird populations from Mongolia to New Zealand.

Part of the controversy is how the land will be used once the tidal flats are filled. Originally it was to increase arable land for rice paddies. But as South Korea produced a massive rice surplus, in spite of an archaic and inefficient agricultural sector, providing more farmland wasn't an essential need. Critics lambasted the scheme as pork-barrel politics for South Korea's powerful construction cartel and as a "make-work" project on an enormous scale.

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Copyright © James Card.