Agent Orange Victims Sue Monsanto
,Tran Anh Kiet's feet, hands and
limbs are twisted and deformed. He is 21 years
old, but trapped inside a body that appears to
belong to a 15 year old with a mental age of
around six. He has to be spoon-fed and writhes
often in evident frustration. All his attempts
at speech are confined to plaintive and pitiful
grunts.
In Kiet's small community in Cu Chi district,
about 45 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh city, south
Vietnam, his story is all too common - indeed
the villagers have a name for young people like
him: Agent Orange babies.
Some 79 million liters of Agent Orange
herbicides were dropped on the jungles of
Vietnam from 1961-1971 in an attempt to
defoliate the rainforest and deny any cover for
the VietCong guerilla forces resisting the
United States occupation of Vietnam.
Today in Vietnam there are 150,000 other
children like Kiet, whose parents allege their
birth defects are the result of exposure to
Agent Orange during the war, or the consumption
of dioxin-contaminated food and water since
1975.
The Vietnamese government estimates that three
million Vietnamese were exposed to these
chemicals during the war, and that at least
800,000 suffer serious health problems today as
a result.
In February 2004, the newly -formed Vietnamese
Association of Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA)
filed a class action law suit in a New York
court, against Monsanto and 36 other
manufacturers of the poisonous chemical.
The plaintiffs and their lawyers deliberately
chose the very same court that had previously
presided over the only previous lawsuit brought
against Agent Orange manufacturers, by US war
veterans. Indeed, the same judge - Jack
Weinstein - is currently hearing pre-trail
arguments in the case.
The original lawsuit was settled in 1984, when
seven American chemical companies paid out $180
million to 291,000 people over a period of 12
years. The settlement was reached after
Weinstein persuaded the companies to buy
themselves out of protracted litigation. But the
chemical companies refused to accept liability,
as part of the settlement, claiming the science
still does not prove that Agent Orange was
responsible for any of the medical horrors its
name has long brought to mind.
Babies with two heads
The first generation of victims were the war
veterans and farmers, who lived off land exposed
to the chemical clouds during the war. The
second generation of victims were their sons and
daughters, and today their children, the third
generation, are also suffering similar health
problems as their parents and grandparents.
Inside the Tu Du hospital in Saigon, grotesque
birth defects - babies born with two heads,
other with short stumps in place of arms or legs
- are a routine sight. Dr Nguyen Thi Phuong Tan,
the specialist in coping with the new-born
victims also keeps a padlocked room of
well-preserved horrors - jars of deformed
fetuses that never made it as evidence.
"You can't imagine the state of these children
in Can Gie district, they can't speak, they are
paralyzed, they have only the life of a
vegetable," says Nguyen Phuoc Hoang, a
researcher who used to work for the Environment
Committee of Ho Chi Minh city.
The third generation of casualties includes
those who live in the vicinity of former US
military bases such as Bien Hoa. Agent Orange
was stored in large quantities on these military
bases.
Dr Arnold Schecter, a leading expert in dioxin
contamination in the US, sampled the soil there
in 2003,and found it to contained dioxin levels
that were 180 million times above the safe level
set by the US environmental protection agency.
It is known as one of some 30 hotspots an
environmental disaster area in urgent need of
decontamination. Yet almost 30 years after the
war nothing has been done about it.
More compelling scientific evidence was
unearthed by a five year study conducted in the
late-1990s by a Canadian environmental firm,
Hatfield Consultants, working in collaboration
with Vietnamese scientists that focused
international attention on the extent of the
contamination.
Hatfield took extensive samples from soil,
water, animals, and people, and tested for
minute concentrations of the active poisons in
Agent Orange near the Ho Chi Minh Trail just
south of Quang Tri province, in the A Luoi
valley.In 2002 the results were made public. The
researchers found "a consistent pattern of
food-chain contamination by Agent Orange
dioxin...in the air base area, which included
soils, fishpond sediment, cultured fish, ducks,
and humans."
Adding Insult to Injury In June 2001 Monsanto was accused by farmers of Ninh Thuan province of pressuring them to use genetically modified seeds that resulted in corn and maize crop failures and economic ruin. Monsanto representatives responded with demands and threats urging the authorities to take action against by the state-run Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper (The New Worker) in Saigon, which printed a story about the farmers complaints, based on research done by social scientist Bui Dac Hai. Agent Orange activists were outraged that Monsanto had returned to haunt Vietnam. Former wartime ambassador Madame Nguyen Ngoc Dung, told CorpWatch: "We have strongly criticized officials responsible for granting a license" (to Monsanto). The activists say that Monsanto has been assiduously cultivating technocrats inside the ministries of trade, investment and planning, who prefer to put the war totally behind them and believe that any campaign over Agent Orange undermines good trading relations with the US, and is therefore bad for business. Another faction of government officials, which includes including prime minister Pham Van Khai, backed by the war veterans argue that economic concerns must be tempered with humanitarian respect for the victims and that Monsanto should be held accountable for their suffering. The success of the Agent Orange victims campaign has caused major differences between the two factions. One communist party intellectual says he believes that "the humanitarian faction in the party is gaining momentum and the chances of driving Monsanto out of Ho Chi Minh city are improving." A Monsanto spokesperson told CorpWatch that the company has been selling four varieties of hybrid corn seed since 1995 in addition to herbicides including Roundup and Lasso brands but that "Monsanto has no biotechnology crops on the market there." |