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The Value of Vietnam
Photo Illustration : Joseph Tart
After a long period of postwar international isolation and economic stagnation, Vietnam is changing fast. The process began gradually in 1986, when a Communist Party Congress liberalized the command-style economy. The economic renovation accelerated during the 1990s as investments from Asia and Europe began pouring in. It gained further impetus in 1995, when relations were normalized with the United States, and U.S. citizens were allowed to do business with Vietnam.
While rapid industrialization is bringing a measure of prosperity to many Vietnamese, it is also coming at a high environmental cost: outdated factories are polluting the environment, garbage services are overtaxed, sewage treatment is nonexistent, and intensive agriculture is contaminating water and workers alike. "The transition to a market-oriented economy and the opening of the country for foreign investment are providing important benefits to the people of Vietnam and bringing relatively rapid economic growth," says Vo Quy, president of the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies at the National University in Hanoi. "But Vietnam is being confronted with a number of serious environmental problems, including deforestation, degradation of land resources, shortages of fresh water, over-exploitation of biological resources, threats to ecosystems, and increasing pollution."
Today, Vietnam is poised for an economic boom. According to government figures reported by Reuters news service, the gross domestic product (GDP)--which measures an economy's output of goods and services--is rising at 9.5% and is expected to soon pass into the double-digit range. Although this statistic promises a long-deserved measure of prosperity after decades of austerity, 1994 World Bank statistics indicate that resources are tight: the 1993 per capita GDP was only $180, compared to $3,140 in nearby Malaysia and $2,150 in Thailand. Meanwhile, the population of 74.5 million is growing at 2.2%, well above the world average of 1.68%, and the unemployment rate is about 20%. Vietnam also faces serious public health challenges. Infant mortality is 36 per thousand live births, compared to 26 in Thailand and 14 in Malaysia, and life expectancy at birth is 65.2 years, which is slightly above the world average of 64.7 but below the averages of 70.8 in Malaysia and 69.0 in Thailand.
Aftershocks
Vietnam was occupied by, or battled with, France, Japan, the United States, Cambodia, China, and itself during the 20th century. The weapons used in these wars went beyond bullets and artillery to include napalm, defoliants, wetland drainage, crop destruction, and a bombing campaign of historic intensity, to create a continuing legacy of ecological and health problems.
Twenty-one years after North Vietnamese troops raised their flag over Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the country still has "endless thousands" of unexploded bombs, according to Arthur Westing, an environmental consultant who writes about the effect of war on the environment. "Usually, whatever it takes to unearth the bomb--road repair, hoeing, or plowing--is likely to set it off," he points out. The most common victims are farmers and children, and the most frequent injuries are loss of one leg (41%), loss of one arm (33%), and serious head or stomach injury (16%), according to figures from the Quang Tri Provincial Health Department.
The United Nations Land Mine Database estimates that 3.5 million mines remain in the country, mostly in the south. In Quang Tri province, bordering the old demilitarized zone (DMZ), unexploded ordnance causes an average of 45 injuries and 47 deaths annually. In 1996, Peace Trees, a Washington State nonprofit organization, began a cooperative mine-removal effort from 18 acres in the DMZ. Using modern detectors that can find ordnance containing only 2% metal, three U.S. volunteers helped Vietnamese soldiers remove 360 mines and other unexploded munitions. "We got everybody's mines--North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, U.S., even French," says Peace Trees director Daanan Parry. The group plans to plant trees on the site and build a center to teach children to avoid mines.
Herbicides. Perhaps the greatest legacy of the wars in Vietnam, however, is the effects of herbicides. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 44 million liters of Agent Orange over roughly 10% of southern Vietnam in an effort to deprive the enemy of cover in the forests. Agent Orange was a blend of two herbicides; 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. Each gram of 2,4,5-T carried as a contaminant 0.02-54 micrograms of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD)--considered the most potent of dioxins. Dioxins are byproducts of certain chemical reactions where chlorine is present; the largest sources are incinerators, paper bleaching, and chemical manufacturing. Members of this chemical family have been blamed for a variety of health effects, including cancer, skin disease, birth defects, and neurological disease. All told, about 170 kilograms of TCDD was released during the defoliation campaign.
The U.S. Institute of Medicine's Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides was charged with clarifying the effects of defoliant herbicide exposure on the 2-3 million U.S. veterans who may have been exposed to it during service in Vietnam. The committee found strong evidence that herbicide exposure caused elevated rates of the skin disease chloracne, as well as soft-tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Hodgkin's disease. The committee also found suggestive evidence linking the exposure to respiratory cancer, prostate cancer, and multiple myeloma, and limited evidence that it caused spina bifida in children of veterans.
Arnold Schecter, a dioxin expert from the State University of New York in Binghamton, thinks dioxins also cause reproductive, immunological, and neurological disorders. Schecter acknowledges that early studies in the area have been inconclusive, but says this is because they relied on inadequate body burden measurements. "The literature is changing very rapidly and demonstrating new human health effects of dioxin," he argues.
But dioxin is controversial. Allan Okey, chair of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Toronto, and a participant on the NIEHS mission to Vietnam, is one of the doubters. "Everybody agrees on dioxin and chloracne, but for the effects on reproduction and cancer endpoints, the data are not nearly as clear," he says. The great puzzle is why dioxin would be so toxic in some laboratory animals and not in humans. "The goal of reducing dioxin loading in the environment is desirable," says Okey, who has consulted on dioxin to the pulp and paper industry, "but the interpretation that current levels are having health effects is not supported by current evidence."
Although the many Vietnamese who lived and farmed in sprayed areas were exposed to much more dioxin than most GIs, dioxin studies in Vietnam have been inconclusive. According to John Constable, a retired Boston plastic surgeon who began studying herbicide effects in Vietnam in 1969, "There were lots of suggestive papers produced by the Vietnamese. They did hard work with not much money, and yet it's very difficult to show any papers that clearly meet Western standards of proof for an association between dioxin and anything but soft-tissue sarcoma."
Statistician and dioxin expert Christopher Portier of the NIEHS goes further, saying dioxin studies in Vietnam have yielded very limited information "because they generally do not fully explain the methodology used in their analysis of study results." Finally, although Vietnamese studies seem uniformly positive for an association between dioxin and disease, some experts question these findings due to the fact that the contaminant was spread so unevenly through the environment (and therefore, exposures should vary), and the studies generally used memory rather than lab tests to measure exposure. Since memory is not a good guide to exposure, both the "exposed" and the "unexposed" groups were probably erroneously categorized, thus nullifying the results of some studies.
Nevertheless, Vietnam's National Committee for the Investigation of the Consequences of the Chemicals Used During the Vietnam War, usually referred to as the 10-80 Committee, has put a great deal of effort into herbicide-effects research. In 1993, the group issued Herbicides in War, the Long-Term Effects on Man and Nature, a report on research into ecological and human health effects of the defoliation campaign. A study of 1,000 Vietnamese by Bui Dai, a doctor at a military hospital in Hanoi, showed significant increases in neurological, dermatological, digestive, and infectious diseases, as well as in spontaneous abortions, premature births, and congenital malformations among 523 people who lived in sprayed areas. In a 1990 article in Chemosphere, Le Cao Dai, the former secretary general of the 10-80 Committee, compared birth records for two sprayed villages to those of one unsprayed village, and calculated that during the period 1966-1971, children in the sprayed villages were 2.4 times as likely to die during their first year of life. This relative risk had declined to 1.4 for the period 1981-1986.
Because dioxin may disrupt the endocrine system, it could be involved in causing reproductive disorders such as gestational trophoblastic disease (GTB), which affects the tissue connecting the placenta to the uterus. GTB can range from partial hydatiform moles, lesions of the placental villi, to the cancer choriocarcinoma. Dinh Xuan Tuu, a researcher at the Institute for the Protection of the Mother and Newborn, an ob/gyn hospital in Hanoi, found partial hydatiform moles in tissue from 3,000 abortions. Moles were found in 5% of tissues from northern Vietnam, where herbicides were not sprayed during the war, and in 16% from the south. Paolo Toniolo, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University, says Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City treats 800 cases of GTB annually. Noting that the disease seems particularly prevalent among women born during the herbicide campaign, Toniolo says the data "may point a finger to an environmental exposure that's more common in the south," and should be subject to a well-designed study.
In Vietnam, as in the United States, dioxin research is a sensitive matter. In June of 1995, scientists from the NIEHS had to surrender samples and data to government officials before leaving Vietnam. Similarly, in 1996, experts from Hatfield Consultants, a Vancouver firm that tests for dioxin around paper mills, were prevented from bringing back from Vietnam 200 samples of soil, plants, and foodstuffs, according to Hatfield's vice president, Wayne Dwernychuk. Observers say that such problems may result from Vietnamese fears that news about contamination might damage tourism and food exports. Schecter says that environmental and human TCDD burdens in southern Vietnam are falling as the contaminant decomposes and washes into river and marine sediments. "The average [body] burden in the south is [now] similar to the burden in the United States," he says. However, to deal with any lingering threat, he says, Vietnam could identify and reduce access to hot spots of contamination, and increase medical monitoring for citizens with high body burdens.
Defoliation. The herbicide campaign also had indirect effects on environmental health. For example, the mangrove trees that protected sections of the coastline in southern Vietnam were particularly susceptible to a single spraying of Agent Orange. About 260,000 acres of these coastal mangroves were destroyed, according to the book Herbicides in War by Phan Nguyen Hong and colleagues at the Mangrove Ecosystem Research Center. These denuded areas are particularly vulnerable to typhoons, which strike the coast an average of 10 times per year. "If there's nothing to hold the shore in place," says Westing, "you might lose 40 or 50 feet of shoreline in a single typhoon." Vietnamese researchers have experimented with planting combinations of nipa palm, mangrove, and other species in the former mangrove areas, trying to establish an area that provides villagers with a variety of forest and fishery products.
This decline of mangroves could be damaging fish catches, Westing adds, because "half of river fish and maybe two-thirds of ocean fish used the mangrove areas for breeding or nursery purposes." Furthermore, the soil in some of the former mangroves has become acidic, with a pH of 4-5, which many species of aquatic and plant life cannot tolerate, according to Herbicides in War.
While fishing remains an important source of jobs and supplies nearly half of animal protein in the Vietnamese diet, aquaculture has become a growth industry that now employs 260,000 people and produces 300,000 tons of seafood, according to a 1991 United Nations International Development Organization report. The aquaculture farms are vulnerable to environmental disruptions, for example, in October of 1995 a 1,700-ton oil spill in Ho Chi Minh City caused a widespread shrimp kill. Aquaculture has become another stress on a coastal environment that Vo calls "severely degraded." Recent economic pressures, he says, "to convert mangroves to agriculture, aquaculture, and urban developments, are accelerating the destruction and un-economic use" of coastal land and destroying some of the large areas of mangroves in the southern Vietnam that were lost during the war and then replanted.
Upland Forests. A single spraying of herbicide was not enough to kill trees in upland forests; some areas were sprayed as many as five times and, Westing says, the more applications, the greater the damage. In many cases, dead trees in the uplands were replaced by aggressive grasses that produce a flammable, durable savanna unsuitable for cattle. Dry-season fires sweep through the savanna and kill young trees, and because the grasses resprout from their roots, the fires have the effect of perpetuating the savanna. While a few reforestation efforts have shown good results, Nguyen Quang Ha and Phu Tuu Boi of the Ministry of Forestry observe in Herbicides in War that "regreening the bald hills and open lands is very costly work."
Forests that survived the defoliation campaign have come under pressure, Vo says, from "the rapidly growing population's demand for forest products and agricultural land." He estimates that 50% of the present annual deforestation of 271,000 acres results from fuelwood gathering and logging, 25% is due to shifting agriculture, and another 25% comes from fire and construction. And even though 24% of Vietnam's original forest remains, according to the World Resources Institute, Vo says its quality has seriously decreased.
The loss and degradation of forest cover is creating downstream impacts, as increased runoff has turned floods into an annual problem in some areas. A 1992 flood in the North Central Coast that killed hundreds of people was due in part to the deforested watersheds, environmentalists told the Vietnam News. Similarly, this October, floods killed 64 people and caused at least 120,000 to be evacuated in the Mekong Delta.
Pesticides and Farming
Agriculture employs 65% of Vietnam's workforce and produces 36% of the GDP. As Vietnam integrates its economy with the world economy, farmers are shifting away from subsistence crops like cassava toward export crops like rubber and coffee, threatening food security in the countryside. A 1985 survey by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that 42% of children under five had protein energy malnutrition (largely because meat is expensive and oil is scarce in the diet), and that 22.5% of households existed at the "starvation level." Almost 10 million people had iodine deficiency, and 1 million suffered from goiter.
The effort to feed a growing population and increase food exports (Vietnam is already the world's third-largest exporter of rice) relies on 20,000 tons of pesticides annually, 80% of which are insecticides, according to a 1995 article by Pham Bhin Quyen and colleagues in Trends in Analytical Chemistry. In 1990 and 1991, the FAO Intercountry Program for Integrated Pest Control in Rice in South and Southeast Asia reported that pesticides were applied more frequently to rice in southern Vietnam (an average of 5.3 applications per crop) than elsewhere in Asia. In northern Vietnam, the average was 1.0 application per crop. Comparatively, China used 3.5 applications, the Philippines 2.0 applications, and India 2.4 applications per crop.
Pesticide handling is primitive at best. Fifteen percent of households store pesticides in their homes, a 1995 Ministry of Health survey found, and the use of protective clothing and respirators is virtually nonexistent, given that the hot, humid climate makes such measures unpopular. When the NIEHS team visited a tea plantation in 1995, it learned that every field worker showed cholinesterase inhibition, a strong suggestion of exposure to organophosphate insecticides.
According to Pham, by 1995 market liberalization had brought "a greater tendency towards the application of cheaper, more hazardous pesticides and less conformity to the guidelines issued by the Plant Protection Department; some banned pesticides, including DDT and arsenic, are still being use[d]." Seventeen percent of insecticides used in Vietnam are classified as "extremely hazardous" by the World Health Organization. NIEHS team member Ernest Hodgson, head of the department of toxicology at North Carolina State University, says, "There are some [pesticides] that would be relatively safe--like the pyrethroids--but there doesn't seem to be any kind of concerted effort to encourage their use."
Ironically, this heavy use of insecticides may be unnecessary. K.L. Heong, of the entomology and plant pathology division of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), observed in a study reported at a conference in Hanoi in May of 1994 and published jointly by IRRI and the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry, that insecticide use patterns in Vietnam "did not appear to reflect pest situations," that farmers tended to "overreact" to visible but innocuous insects, and that "widespread gaps in knowledge of farmers and unfavorable attitudes of farmers toward natural methods of pest management have encouraged pesticide misuse."
Ill-ing fields? Dependence on pesticides, including many classified as extremely hazardous, is increasing in Vietnam, the world's third largest exporter of rice.
Insecticides are showing up in the environment and in people. Japanese researcher Hisato Iwata and colleagues reported in a 1994 article in Environmental Protection that airborne levels of DDT in Vietnam and other Asian locations were "2-3 orders of magnitude higher than those in Japan . . . [the] USA . . . and some parts of Europe." A study by Kurunthachalam Kaanan and colleagues, published in 1992 in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicolology, detected PCBs, hexachlorocyclohexane isomers, DDT, and aldrin and dieldrin insecticides in animal fat, butter, meat, and seafood samples taken from several locations in Vietnam. Further, the study calculated that the average daily intake of some organochlorines "[was] higher than those observed in most of the developed nations." What relationship these levels may have to adverse health effects is not currently known as almost no study of the matter has been done, although most scientists agree there needs to be further research.
The future of Vietnam. As Vietnam's population continues to grow at rates above the world average, the country struggles with how to provide basic necessities.
A 1989 study directed by Schecter, published in Chemosphere, found 4,220-7,300 parts per billion (ppb) of P.P.1-DDT in samples of human breast milk gathered from 12 women from southern Vietnam. These levels were "consistent with recent or ongoing contamination of these women with DDT." Such studies, however, may not amount to a condemnation of the use of DDT; this use must be seen in context of the need for vector control to prevent spread of disease. Vietnam has the world's fifth-highest incidence of malaria outside of Africa, with 212,000 cases in 1992, according to the WHO. Mosquitoes are also vectors for dengue fever; last July the Vietnamese government announced that already more than 10,000 people had contracted dengue in 1996 and that at least 45 had died. Vietnam faces a tradeoff between trying to contain an environmental disease and allowing environmental contamination.
Although there has been little study of whether high levels of ambient insecticides are causing disease, insecticide poisoning cases are common in Vietnam's hospitals. Many of these cases are supposedly suicides, but Hodgson says he's never seen a rigorous study of the subject, and suspects that the sheer number of poisonings signals careless handling of insecticides. To control the problem, he suggests better labeling, more protective measures, and farmer education.
Water Pollution
Although Vo notes that agricultural activities are causing "a serious problem with water pollution in many regions of the country," the threat of industrial pollution could be even worse, as Vietnam's industrial output is growing at 14% annually, while air and water pollution controls are scarce or nonexistent. According to Pham, "All of the waste water discharged from the approximately 3,000 industrial enterprises--roughly half of them in heavy industry--is improperly treated." A comprehensive World Bank report from 1995, Vietnam: Environmental Program and Policy Priorities for a Socialist Economy in Transition, found "there is no functioning wastewater treatment plant (for domestic and industrial [waste]) in any city in the entire country. Most wastewater is discharged into rivers, canals, or lakes without treatment."
"Water pollution from industrial and domestic sewage has become a serious issue in all cities and towns," says Vo, "especially in large cities such as Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Haiphong, and other industrial areas." Nationally, the annual discharge of untreated sewage and industrial wastewater into major rivers is estimated at 240-300 million cubic meters, an amount the World Bank projects will grow 10-fold within 15 years. Already, the combined annual discharge into rivers by the three largest cities, plus the Viet Tri chemical production district, is estimated to include 1,550 tons of benzene and 249 tons of sulfuric acid. At the Bai Bang Paper Company in Vinh Phu province, about 100 km northwest of Hanoi, adsorbable organic halogens were measured in 1989 at about 24 times the rate expected from a more modern plant. An international group of researchers who studied pollution from the plant, led by N.T. Kim Oanh of the Environmental Monitoring Program at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, warned in a 1995 article in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology that "organochlorines . . . may eventually end up at alarming levels in the coastal sediment and ecosystem, thus posing long-term pollution threats." Already, municipal sewage samples in Ho Chi Minh City contain concentrations of PCBs that indicate contamination from discarded electrical equipment, according to the 1994 study by Iwata.
The picture regarding human waste is similar. According to WHO figures, only 23% of city dwellers have access to sewers, household privies, or latrines, while just 10% of rural people are using even basic measures like pour-flush latrines.
All this untreated wastewater is polluting surface water. Rivers in the major cities have a biological oxygen demand (BOD) of 2.5-7.5 times the Vietnamese and European Community's standards for surface waters that supply drinking water, indicating that the water has a high organic content. These rivers cannot support fish, since their dissolved oxygen level is less than 4 milligram per liter.
For drinking water, good treatment and easy access are the exception. In 1990, only 47% of city dwellers lived within 200 meters of a water standpipe, according to the World Resources Institute, and 66% of rural dwellers spent a disproportionate amount of time fetching water. Only Ho Chi Minh City's system meets WHO standards for pure drinking water.
In 1995, the World Bank concluded that nonexistent wastewater treatment and limited water supply and treatment constituted a public health hazard: "Excreta-related and waterborne diseases such as gastroenteritis, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and viral hepatitis are also important sources of morbidity, especially among children." According to Ministry of Health data, the incidence of diarrhea in 1994, was 1,693 cases per 100,000. The incidence of typhoid and paratyphoid was 34 cases per 100,000. A typhoid epidemic in southern Vietnam in the early 1990s was attributed to lack of pure water, fecal pollution, low levels of individual hygiene and public sanitation, and spraying vegetables with polluted water.
Some help is on the horizon. The World Bank is soliciting bids for a $150 million project to build new raw water mains, expand and update treatment plants, and lay distribution piping in four large cities. In addition, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is sponsoring a well-digging and casing program in the Mekong Delta, where salt water has polluted existing wells. A well casing is a liner that prevents groundwater from above the potable aquifer from entering the well.
Air Pollution
Rapid industrialization is also polluting the air. According to the 1995 World Bank report, dust from cement factories coats much of Haiphong, the third-largest city, exceeding government air standards by three to eight times. In Hanoi, the report states, "ambient air pollutants have reached alarming levels . . . [C]arbon monoxide concentrations are 1.5 to 1.7 times higher than permissible levels, nitrogen dioxide 2.5 to 2.9 times higher, settleable particulates 43 to 60 times higher, and suspended particulates 5 to 10 times higher." In Ho Chi Minh City in 1991, 750,000 motorcycles and 75,000 other vehicles, all burning leaded gasoline, contributed to an ambient lead level of 1-4 micrograms per cubic meter. In comparison, Chicago's airborne lead level in 1988 was less than 0.5 micrograms per cubic meter, according to research published in Pediatrics in 1994. One of the few numerical indicators of how air pollution affects human health was a 1991 Ministry of Health survey showing that 27% of patients at clinics and hospitals in three provinces were suffering acute respiratory infection.
One sign of growing interest in controlling air pollution was the announcement in October that the Vietnamese government will spend $12.4 million to limit pollution from the Nih Binh coal-fired electric generating station, a notorious polluter built in 1976. The government has also announced a switch to unleaded gas, but one government official predicted that could take 10 years.
Trash and Traffic
Only a small percentage of an estimated 9,100 m3 of garbage generated daily in Vietnam is being collected, writes Pham. City collection rates range from 90% in Ho Chi Minh City to less than 50% in Hanoi, and uncollected waste is "either burned or dumped in river[s], lakes, ponds, etc." In Hanoi, according to Urban Harvest: Recycling as a Peasant Industry in Northern Vietnam, a 1994 monograph by Michael deGregorio published by the East-West Center, the municipality collects only 382 of the 832 metric tons of garbage generated daily. Between 181 and 286 tons were collected by private scavengers for recycling, and 103-190 tons were dumped in lakes, fed to animals, or burned. Fully 139 tons, or 17%, could not be accounted for.
Because 50% of Hanoi's collected garbage is organic material, city authorities have built a pilot plant to compost 30,000 m3 of organic garbage annually, along with 1,750 m3 of sewage sludge. But the increasing trend toward landfilling garbage may pose another set of problems in a country where the population density is 5.1 times the world average and per capita cropland is just one-third the world average. Judith Ladinsky, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of preventive medicine and chair of the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam, says, "What would be productive land is being turned into . . . a garbage dump."
As Vietnam modernizes, it must also upgrade its road system. Ladinsky calls traffic accidents "an environmental health problem of the first order that accounts for the largest caseload at hospital emergency rooms. . . You see entire families--parents and two or three children--riding motor scooters, and there's no law against it. The entire regulatory and traffic structure need[s] overhauling." The sheer volume of traffic is certain to intensify if current vehicle sales, about 10,000 per year, grow to 60,000 as expected by the year 2000.
Future Prospects
How can Vietnam address its environmental health problems? As one contribution, the 1995 NIEHS study mission recommended establishing a jointly supported biomedical research institute to study topics chosen by the Vietnamese. In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and several Vietnamese agencies have discussed joint efforts. However, Vietnam's reluctance to allow the export of dioxin samples indicates that any collaboration will require tact and patience.
Vietnam does not have to look far to see the hazards of unbridled growth. "Thailand is a very good example for anyone dealing with environmental problems," says Nguyen Hoa Binh, an official of the National Environment Agency, speaking in an article by the Deutsche Press Agency. The limited amount of foreign assistance that has been pledged to date, several officials say, is simply not enough to meet the huge challenges of today and tomorrow.
Vietnam's environmental policies date to 1985, with the development of a National Conservation Strategy that urged maintenance of ecological and life-support processes of the country's various ecosystems and the preservation of its genetic diversity. In 1992, a national plan was developed to coordinate the development of regulations, information systems, and strategies for sustainable development, and to promote the use of environmental impact assessments. This in turn led to the passage of the Environmental Protection Law in 1993, giving environmental authority to the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment.
Yet the management may look better on paper than it does in reality. Environmental protection, as Vo notes, requires "better technical tools for monitoring, control, and information--all of which are seriously lacking in Vietnam." Indeed, some observers have complained that the environmental impact assessments required before construction of new factories are ignored once the factories go into operation.
In its effort to balance environmental and economic needs, end-of-the-pipeline strategies may be simply too expensive. Ladinsky suggests that Vietnamese officials insist on real, not paper, environmental protection when negotiating with foreign businesses about locating in Vietnam. "These companies want to come to Vietnam as much as Vietnam wants them to come, so they can negotiate on equal terms."
Clearly, in a country as poor as Vietnam, development cannot be seen as optional. Vo, whose lifetime of environmental work earned him the 1995 Pew Environmental Fellowship, says that meeting "the basic needs and aspirations of the people of our country without destroying the natural resources is a great and difficult task" that will require meshing "the principles of ecology-conservation and economy-development."
David Tenenbaum
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Last Update: January 23, 1997
