Vietnam is demanding compensation from manufacturers of Agent Orange, VOA News reported. It said this is what experts describe as the last resort for helping citizens who still fall sick or face disabilities linked to the defoliant the United States used during the war in the country five decades ago.
The foreign ministry in Hanoi asked that Monsanto and other U.S. firms compensate victims of Agent Orange, the Vietnamese news outlet VnExpress International reported and cited by VOA News.
Vietnam made the demand after a U.S. jury ordered Monsanto to pay damages to an American cancer patient with claims that he was exposed to a weed killer produced by the same company.
This demand, emboldened by the U.S. jury’s decision, follows the 2005 loss of a class action lawsuit brought by Vietnamese citizens to a federal judge in New York.
The government also hopes to avoid a world court filing, which would be state-to-state rather than aimed at a company and could hurt otherwise stable political relations with the United States, said Trung Nguyen, director of the Center for International Studies at Ho Chi Minh University of Social Sciences and Humanities.
“Vietnam sees the verdict against Monsanto as setting legal precedent which overrides previous claims that the herbicides made by Monsanto are harmless,” said Murray Hiebert, deputy director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“Previously, legal efforts to link dioxin and birth defects failed in the U.S. courts.”
Agent Orange in Vietnam
Vietnam may be able to build a case if it turns out that Roundup, the Monsanto weed killer the U.S. jury ruled on this month, and Agent Orange contain similar toxins, Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia-specialized emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said.
Agent Orange remains volatile at some “hotspots” where it was stored during the war that ended in 1975, he said.
“It’s not as effective as before, but it’s still deadly, or it still produces birth defects,” Thayer said. “The issue in Vietnam are families, who have children, that feel they were never compensated or treated fairly.”
American military aircraft used Agent Orange to clear jungles in Vietnam and expose enemy soldiers from 1961 through 1971. Its residue dioxin is believed to be a "risk factor" for health problems, said Charles Bailey, author of the book “From Enemies to Partners—Vietnam, the U.S. and Agent Orange.”
About 800,000 Vietnamese people get assistance now for illness and disabilities because of exposure, he said. Vietnam claimed half a million children had been born with serious birth defects, while as many 2 million people are suffering from cancer or other illness caused by Agent Orange.
Cited from Military.com, the U.S. themselves has their Veteran Affairs to compensate soldiers who served anywhere in Vietnam between January 9, 1962, and May 7, 1975, and are presumed to have been exposed to herbicides, as specified in the Agent Orange Act of 1991, with health care program.
The U.S. government gave US$230 million to Vietnam to clean up dioxin-contaminated soils at Vietnam’s Da Nang airport and help tens of thousands of young Vietnamese with “severe disabilities in the areas that were the most heavily sprayed,” Bailey said.
The airport and a second site have been cleaned, he said, and cleanup of a third will take ten years plus $500 million.
Source: VOA News, Military.com, History.com