Long Term Impacts of the Vietnamese War
Hatfield Consultants Ltd.
has developed an approach
for detecting areas
contaminated by chemicals
used during the Vietnam
War and for finding landmines
and unexploded ordnance. |
Hatfield Consultants Ltd., an environmental consulting firm from West Vancouver, BC, initiated their first CIDA-INC supported project in Vietnam in 1994. The project centered on the assessment of long-term impacts from Agent Orange, a herbicide used during the Vietnam war. Agent Orange contains a highly toxic compound, dioxin, which has been linked to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses in humans. The project included the transfer of new technologies for environmental impact assessment, training, and impact mitigation measures to Hatfield`s Vietnamese, Thai, and Cambodian counterparts.
Hatfield’s studies on Agent Orange revealed that dioxin continues to contaminate the soil some 30 years after cessation of herbicide use in Vietnam and that former US military installations are the “hot spots” of high dioxin contamination to this day.
In 2001, Hatfield received CIDA-INC financial support to refine the technology for determining landmine and unexploded ordinance contaminated areas, for looking at related chemical contamination problems, and for developing and applying environmental mitigation and monitoring techniques appropriate to field conditions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
As in their work with Agent Orange contamination, capacity building and institutional strengthening inside Vietnam were integral parts of the landmine program from the onset. Initial workshops were designed to maximize the constructive inputs of local residents, prototype tools and technologies were evaluated by local users, UXO clearance manuals were developed for use by local teams, Vietnamese partner agencies developed techniques appropriate to field conditions in Vietnam, more than half of the local residents trained in land reclamation and re-vegetation practices were women -- in short, technology transfer and training took place at every step in the project.
To date, the work conducted by Hatfield Consultants Ltd. in Vietnam, with financial support provided by CIDA-INC, has spawned a number of downstream projects.
- The Thailand Environmental Impact Training project, already funded by CIDA's institutional partnerships program; in which 650 Thais were trained in environmental impact assessment over a four year period.
- Hatfield Consultants was involved in an on-going Environmental Information and Report project in Vietnam funded by the Danish government (DANIDA).
- The Ford Foundation funded Hatfield Consultants Ltd., through the Vietnamese Ministry of Health, to continue their Agent Orange dioxin work on the “hot spot” issue in southern Vietnam.
The efforts of one small Canadian company, with the assistance of CIDA-INC, have resulted in positive results for a small business in offshore markets.
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