[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Agent Orange in Vietnam: Social Science Approaches to the Environmental and Health Consequences of War
Organizer, Chair and Discussant: Diane Fox, Hamilton College
For a decade during the Vietnam War, US aircraft sprayed chemicals that devastated 10- 15% of forests and croplands in the south of Vietnam, exposing perhaps 5 million people to a mix of chemicals often referred to as “Agent Orange.” In the nearly half a century intervening, we have learned much about the spraying and its persistent effects today in certain 'hot spots’, much about the dioxin that contaminated most of the chemicals, and much about the links between dioxin and a wide range of debilitating conditions in adults and children. Five countries now compensate their veterans for diseases linked to these chemicals, South Korean courts have awarded damages against the products’ manufacturers, a Vietnamese lawsuit is pending in US courts, and the US ambassador is calling for resolution of the issue. To the scientific and political debates that have thus far dominated discussion of Agent Orange, this panel adds perspectives from the social sciences. Boi reviews the extent of Agent Orange spraying, discussing current work to clean up remaining dioxin contamination. McElwee considers the secondary environmental effects on the livelihoods of people in some of Vietnam’s poorest areas. Johansson discusses the need to consider the consequences for the whole family in reproductive counseling, based on her interviews with “Agent Orange families.” And Gammeltoft explores how Agent Orange is taking on a life of its own in Vietnamese society, as a mass-mediated and condensed symbol of pain which informs population policies and infuses women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth.
Agent Orange and the Environment: From Research to Remediation
Boi T. Phung, Assistance for Natural Conservation- NGO, Viet Nam
An estimated 21 million gallons of Agent Orange were used in Vietnam to clear dense vegetation to better locate North Vietnamese troops and deny them cover and food crops. More than 15 million acres of land were sprayed, of which 12% received triple coverage, causing extreme environmental damage in some sensitive ecosystems. Additionally, new records from both Vietnam and the US indicate that between 2.1 and 4.8 million people were likely directly exposed to the herbicide sprayings during the war thirty years ago. A lingering concern is that several areas of Vietnam have been identified as ‘hotspots’, sites where spraying was most intensive or where herbicides were stored or spilled. Dioxin levels in these hotspots remain unacceptably high, and are a potential source of continuing human exposure even today. In this paper, I will outline my work as a GIS specialist working to identify these hotspots, and describe new projects being set up through local Vietnamese NGOs to attempt remediation in these hotspots. One new project in the A Luoi valley, one of the most heavily sprayed areas, is attempting not only to find ways of providing physical barriers to contaminated areas (for example, by planting hardy and heavily thorned trees), but also to find ways of improving local incomes. Many of these projects have been undertaken by Vietnamese scientists and the public as concern grows in Vietnam over the slow US response to this issue.
Agent Orange and Global Environmental Justice: Secondary Effects of Wartime Damage
Pam McElwee, Arizona State University
This paper looks at the consequences of Agent Orange (AO) from the perspective of environmental justice. Environmental justice is concerned with social inequities resulting when underprivileged communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental problems. This is particularly relevant to the AO case, as one neglected area of attention in Vietnam today is the lingering effects of the war-time defoliation on ecosystems. While much attention is rightly paid to the present health effects from dioxin exposure, one area we know very little about is the effect on people who lost livelihoods dependent on hunting and on shifting forest-based agriculture. While initial studies by the US in the early 1970s concluded that there was usually little lasting damage to forests after defoliation, there was concern that certain ecosystems (like mangroves) were more vulnerable and that areas sprayed multiple times might suffer permanent damage. Indeed, it is estimated that 36% of the mangrove forest area in South Vietnam was completely destroyed, and several densely forested areas that were heavily sprayed, like Ma Da and A Luoi, are now dominated by either bamboos or invasive grasses. Given these changed environments, how did formerly forest-dwelling populations survive? Using evidence from research with minority communities along the Truong Son mountains, where the Ho Chi Minh trail ran, I will look at what we do and don't know about how defoliation from AO affected livelihoods from the 1970s to now, and what environmental consequences remain today.
“The Agent Orange family”: Social Consequences and Reproductive Rights related to the Wartime Use of Agent Orange in Vietnam
Annika Johansson, Karolinska Institute
This paper is based on interviews with families in northern, central and southern Vietnam, where one or several members have been identified as ‘suspected victim of Agent Orange’. Many of the families we interviewed had several disabled children and lived under extreme material hardships and mental stress. Being identified as an ‘Agent Orange victim’ has partly relieved feelings of guilt of the husband and/or the wife of having given birth to disabled children, which previously was associated with perceptions of ancestral or personal sins. But at the same time it has reinforced the fear of genetic transmission of ‘bad Agent Orange genes’. Parents try to hide their disabled children, fearing that their healthy children may not find a spouse. Healthy siblings in ‘Agent Orange families’ worry about prospects of getting married and giving birth to disabled children. To the burden of caring for severely disabled children is added the fear that ‘dioxin genes’ may cause damage in the third and subsequent generations. This fear is fuelled by the increasing proliferation in Vietnamese mass media of images depicting the adverse effects of dioxin for later generation and for the ‘population quality’. The long term impact of chemical warfare on the rights of young women and men in ‘Agent Orange families’ to bear healthy children is discussed, along with the implications for reproductive counselling.
Agent Orange and “Population Quality”: Political and Visceral Responses in Vietnam to the Spectre of “Defective” Newborns
Tine Mette Gammeltoft, University of Copenhagen
How does a phenomenon such as Agent Orange affect a society? As scholars within and beyond Vietnam struggle to find answers to questions regarding how dioxin contamination has really affected the health of individuals or the makeup of the environment, as activists engaged in humanitarian work seek justice for the affected, Agent Orange seems to be taking on a life of its own – as a mass mediated and condensed symbol of pain, of human life gone awry. In this paper I explore how “Agent Orange”, as a symbol, a fear, an idea, ramifies into other political and personal arenas in Vietnam than those of the individuals and groups that are officially categorized as Agent Orange victims. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Hanoi from 2003 to 2006, I explore how Agent Orange intertwines with fantasies of development and modernization expressed in Government strategies for enhancement of “population quality”, and how the chemical enters into the life worlds of pregnant women, nourishing fears and anxieties concerning the bodily “intactness” of the children they expect. I conclude by reflecting on the ways that activism in this field may, ironically, come to contribute to further stigmatization of those people in Vietnam whose bodies differ from culturally dominant standards of normality.