Monsanto, Dow and Agent Orange – an original article by John Pilger
Agent Orange Action Group is pleased to welcome this original article by John Pilger a renowned writer, broadcaster and film-maker whose documentaries have won prestigious awards from many countries; his contribution to our pages is appreciated.
-Len Aldis
February 24, 2012
On 13 February, a French court found the Monsanto company guilty of poisoning a farmer, Paul Francois, who developed neurological problems after working with one of Monsanto’s weedkiller. The court found that Monsanto had failed to provide proper warning on the product label. When I read that news item, some 40 years vanished. I was back in Vietnam in a fishing village called Son Tra. The American military ‘strategy’ was that the people of Son Tra would be more ‘secure’ if all their basic vegetation was stripped away. This would ‘deny cover to any infiltrating enemy elements’.
Son Tra was sprayed with defoliant herbicides, manufactured by Monsanto and the Dow Chemical Company. The herbicide, 2,4,5-T, was called Agent Orange and contained an impurity, dioxin, one of the most devastating poisons. The previous year, 1970, the US government had banned the marketing of 2,4,5-T following a campaign by small farmers – people like Paul Francois – who gave evidence that the herbicide turned young trees to powder and causes paralysis and blindness among their livestock and impotence in themselves.
Banned at home, the spray could still be used overseas, especially in the American war in Vietnam. It was not long before a pattern of deformities began to emerge in the Vietnamese people: babies were born without eyes, with deformed hearts and small brains and with stumps instead of legs. In August 1970, in a report to the US Senate, Senator Gaylord Nelson wrote that ‘the US had dumped [on south Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population including women and children’.
The impact on the environment was apocalyptic. Mangroves in villages like Son Tra were destroyed perhaps forever. Decaying plant matter robbed the water of oxygen and reduced the catches of fish and crabs by as much as 80 per cent. The land around was stricken with saline and became rock hard and good for nothing.
But the spraying continued. Following the report to the Senate, the US military changed the codename of the Agent Orange operation from ‘Operation Hades’ to the friendlier ‘Operation Ranch Hand’.
Whenever I have returned to Vietnam, and traveled in the Mekong Delta, I see adults and children who bear the deformities of Agent Orange. Because the poison remains in the soil and water, babies are still born deformed, if they are born at all; miscarriages and stillbirths are a mark of the poisoning. One of the two companies that caused this horrific state of affairs, Dow Chemical, was given the contract to provide the ‘decorative wrapping’ to the main stadium for the London Olympic Games, an event that is said to celebrate life and human prowess.
-John Pilger
It is important that John Pilger keeps writing about this war legacy and that disabled people and their carers get sufficient support. But it is also important that we get the facts rights. John writes “Because the poison remains in the soil and water, babies are still born deformed, if they are born at all; miscarriages and stillbirths are a mark of the poisoning.” This is not correct. Babies who are born deformed or miscarriages at this time may be second generation victims if their parents were poisened during the war. But dioxin is not in water at dangerous levels (it is hydrophobic), and generally not in the environment in Viet Nam at any alarming level except for a number of hotspots – not the sprayed areas but the areas where it was stored, handled and eg where sprayplanes crashed.
For all we know, only a very small number of residents near the hotspots and specifically near Danang and Bien Hoa airports have continued to be infected through food chains after the war (by eating contaminated fish from ponds on those airports) and yes, those may have deformed babies still at this time. But that poisoning of people after the war does not concern deformed babies, stillborns and miscarriages all over the country – the large majority of that must be either because of poisoning during the war (so probably second generation) or because of other causes of miscarriages and deformed babies