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."