The possible effects of exposure to the dioxin found in Agent Orange read like a catalogue of horrors: Cancer, stillborn births, skin diseases, and children born with extra fingers and toes. Thirty-seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, these consequences are still being felt by millions of Vietnamese, including children. During the war, the US military sprayed Agent Orange—a chemical combination of herbicide and defoliant—over Vietnamese jungles in an attempt to rout out the Vietcong. While attitudes about Agent Orange in the US and Vietnam have been mired in dissonance over issues of politics, policy, and historical memory for decades, the past few years have seen unprecedented activity and collaboration between their governments, and an Institute policy program has helped guide along this progress.
The Institute has served as the US secretariat for the US-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange since it was proposed by Susan Berresford, who was then the president of the Ford Foundation, in 2007. The group is run by private citizens, and is co-chaired by Ambassador Ha Huy Thong, the vice chair of the foreign affairs committee of Vietnam’s National Assembly, and Institute President Walter Isaacson. Members also include former Institute Chair Bill Mayer and former Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman. In its first meeting, the group laid out its priorities: Clean up dioxin hotspots, establish programs for affected Vietnamese with disabilities, and restore landscape damaged by dioxin. Since that meeting, the group has helped raise $91 million towards these efforts.
That first year, the Dialogue Group joined with the Ford Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Vietnamese government to isolate and measure dioxin levels at Da Nang’s airport, a critical first step towards eventually eliminating it. The airport holds a special significance in the history of Agent Orange in Vietnam, serving as the principle base from which defoliant spraying missions took off and landed. The process of loading, unloading, and cleaning the aircraft led to many accidental leaks of Agent Orange and other defoliants. Over the years, these incidents led to intense concentrations of dioxins in the soil at Da Nang and at two other major hotspots—the former US airfields at Bien Hoa and Phu Cat. This ambitious undertaking required installing a cement cap over the most contaminated soil, filtering dioxin-laden sediment from rainwater, and fencing off a lake that had been carrying contaminated water to nearby households. The group also helped launch a public health campaign in neighborhoods near the Da Nang airport, warning residents about the potential danger of eating fish or duck that might have been exposed to dioxin-laden sediments in nearby lakes and streams.
The Dialogue Group’s hard work came to fruition in August when the Vietnamese Ministry of defense and the Us Agency for International development launched an initiative to rid the soil around Da Nang airport of dioxin.
The Da Nang project is only one instance of the dialogue Group collaborating
with government to amplify its efforts. When USAID announced it was
creating a “comprehensive, multi-year plan for Agent Orange-related activities in Vietnam” earlier this summer, it was following in the footsteps of the Vietnamese
government, which had released their own national Action plan a month before. The dialogue Group submitted recommendations from experts in both countries to USAID, and has offered to help facilitate an exploration of where the two plans overlap. While the group’s work is far from over, the Da Nang project represents real progress, and will lead to a better future for the Vietnamese who have suffered far too much already.
