War affected all the Mekong riparian countries during the 1970s, and it wasn’t until 1988 with the assistance from the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) that Laos, Thailand and Vietnam established an interim Mekong Committee to continue the original committee’s work. The 1995 Mekong Agreement set a new mandate for the organisation ‘to cooperate in all fields of sustainable development, utilisation, management and conservation of the water and related resources of the Mekong River Basin’.