Herbicide: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I’ve finally started reading a book by Timothy Lee Scott, Invasive Plant Medicine: The Ecological and Healing Abilities of Invasives (click on the image to go to the website) and it has provided further support and confirmation for a lot of the things I’ve been writing here as well as further provocative fuel for thought while I go about my business with conservationists and gardeners. I’ve just finished the chapters titled ‘Invasive Herbicidal Impacts’ and ‘The Economics of Weeds’. A passage in the latter confirms my earlier contention that ‘Biocidal poisons used to further the Green Revolution in the mid 20th century came directly from the re-tooled factories of World War Two’:

Nazi Germany pioneered chemical engineering for combating plants, pests, and people by developing highly poisonous organophosphate compounds used in agricultural pesticides and as chemical warfare nerve gases. In America after the two World Wars were over, there was a movement to find use for the millions of pounds of wasted ammunition and explosives that remained. Factories that once manufactured war machinery were waiting to be filled, soldiers needed jobs, and there were plenty of raw materials to use. The first widely used herbicides and pesticides were nothing but leftover weapons of war. Nitrogen- and phosphorous-based compounds accumulated in massive, stockpiled amounts during wartime, which then led to the practice of discarding them on agricultural fields as a synthetic fertilizer throughout America and, eventually, the world.

DuPont was the largest manufacturer of gunpowder during WWI and now is the parent company of the world’s largest seed company, Pioneer HiBred, and Monsanto saw a one-hundred-fold increase in profits by supplying chemicals to produce highly reactive explosives such as TNT. Dow Chemical and Monsanto have been the leading manufacturers of herbicides for decades, reaping huge profits from Agent Orange’s campaign against the Vietnamese jungles and with the Roundup family of herbicides for every dangerous [sic] plant imaginable. (pp.76-7, citing this article by Brian Tokar)

…while the story of ‘Agent Orange and the Rainbow Herbicides’ in the former is pretty horrific:

(source: Wikipedia)

The use of herbicides for warfare was first brought to our attention in the Vietnam War, when rainbow herbicides were sprayed across territories to reveal hideouts, destroy agriculture, and poison the enemy. The barrels containing these agents that Dow Chemical Company and Monsanto, among others, manufactured had a coloured stripe painted on them to identify the contents:

Agent Orange, Agent Green, Agent Pink, Agent White, and Agent Purple

The most common was Agent Orange, an equal blend of two phenoxy herbicides (2, 4-D and 2, 4, 5-T). Between 1961 and 1971, about forty-six thousand tonnes of it was sprayed at intensified rates over 3.5 million acres of southern Vietnamese forests and cropland. Not only were ecosystems completely ravaged by this mass poisoning effort, but also millions of civilians and allied troops were caught in the crossfire. The toxin dioxin used in all of these poisons has been reported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to cause a wide variety of illnesses that affect various bodily systems and is still present in our [sic] environment at high concentrations. Some known ailments that are compensated under VA benefits include type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, respitory cancers, multiple myeloma, Hodgkins disease, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcoma, chloracne, porphyries cutanea tarda, peripheral neuropathy, and spina bifida in the children of veterans. Since 1984, Dow Chemical Company has lost various class-action lawsuits regarding these poisonings of American, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South Korean veterans in Vietnam. All have won health care compensation for the unforseen hazards of their service. (p.69, citing this allmilitary forum post)

Of course the generations of Vietnamese victims have had no such luck, with lawsuits against Dow Chemical and Monsanto and subsequent appeals getting thrown out various US courts between 2004 and 2009. To get a deeper sense of this atrocity, read the Wikipedia article and associated links or, if you’ve got a strong stomach, type ‘agent orange effects’ into an image search engine.

I subscribe to the notion articulated by Hireesh Chandra of the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at Gandhi Medical College, who said, referring to the Bhopal disaster, that individuals or institutions “shouldn’t be permitted to make poison for which there is no antidote” (quoted in Jensen, Culture of Make Believe, p.285)

It seems Agent Orange is still poisoning people in Japan, where:

The U.S. Marine Corps buried a massive stockpile of Agent Orange at the Futenma air station in Okinawa, possibly poisoning the base’s former head of maintenance and potentially contaminating nearby residents and the ground beneath the base, The Japan Times recently learned from interviews with U.S. veterans.

The barrels were apparently abandoned in Okinawa at the end of the Vietnam War — when the U.S. government banned the dioxin-laden defoliant for health reasons — and were buried at the installation in the city of Ginowan after the Pentagon ignored requests to safely dispose of them, according to the veterans who served at the installation in the 1970s and 1980s.

[…]

In 1972, the U.S. removed its stockpiles of Agent Orange from South Vietnam to Johnston Island in the North Pacific where, after a five-year debate over how to dispose of them safely, they were eventually incinerated at sea in 1977.

Scientists researching the dangers of Agent Orange in South Vietnam have discovered that because its highly poisonous dioxin is not dissolved by rainwater, it can remain in the soil, poisoning people for decades. In southern Vietnam today, there are more than 20 dioxin hot spots at sites used by the U.S. military to store Agent Orange.

Where is the accountability for these motherfuckers? How can they get away with this? What incentive do they have to not commit the same crimes in the future?

I don’t expect an answer to these questions anytime soon.

In the meantime I have my work cut out trying to persuade my bosses of the insanity of torching gardens, driveways and even bodies of water with Glyphosate (Monsanto’s patented chemical in Roundup) to kill the plants they or their clients, in their definitely less-than-infinite wisdom, have decided don’t belong.

Tags: agent orange, bhopal, biocide, defoliants, diease, dupont, herbicide, monsanto, roundup, vietnam