response to emergency water situations. By the time the project was completed,it was already evident that the tanks were having little impact on agricultural production and were unlikely to do so.The project did send forty-eight engineers and officers to the United States for training, which was probably the major contribution of the project as an input into strengthening the RID.The history of the tank project is worth pursuing in some detail.it was the first substantial aid investment in the Northeast region, an area that was to become the focus of much U.S. effort.As we shall see below,AID returned to the problems of water in the Northeast again and again over the years,including later attempts to rehabilitate a few of the same tanks and make them work.The tanks represented the first signlticant project in a continuous and often frustrating endeavor to find solutions to the region's poverty.The tanks never offered a major option for controlling the water regime of the Northeast. lrrigation from all possible sources,including from the Mekong and its Northeast tributaries,is not thought to be feasible for more than 15 percent of the region's arable land,and the tanks represented only a small fraction of even this irrigable potential. Nevertheless,in the search by the Thai government and the donors to do whatever might yield tangible benefits for the region's inhabitants, the tanks appeared to be a reasonable,if economically marginal,proposition.RID first began constructing tanks in the Northeast in 1939.The first postwar survey of Thai agriculture by FAO in 1950 recommended further tank construction.in 1959 the World Bank was still endorsing the tank; The return in additional rice production, relative to investments,is not so high as on most irrigation projects recommended in other regions.it is, nevertheless, quite sufficient to justify the necessary expenditure...A stepped-up tank irrigation program is urged as a sound means of contributing to the employmen? income of the large and relatively poorer population of the Northeast.As late as 1980 the Bank offered to fund the rehabilitation of all the tanks.There were serious technical flaws and administrative problems hobbling the tank program. The tanks were unlined.and due to the porous nature of Northeast soils lost much their impounded water through seepage.Most of tanks lacked adequate water distribution channel systems because of legal and jurisdictional problems over which department of the government had responsibility for main and subsidiary canal construction for these small