My Friend Karl Levy, lives in Singapore, and travels deep into the jungles of Vietnam and Laos, further than the 'tourist trail'. This post that he put on my timeline deserves to be read. Its ironic that this warzone of my youth now underpins the rhetoric in the March Against Monsanto, and is against those that were the "good guys" back 50 years ago....
"I have noted your very strong campaign against Monsanto re genetically modified crops. Separate to this issue i am not one into hyperbole about various topics nor imaginary exaggerations but you may be interested in some first hand experience into agent orange produced by the company for the Vietnam war. i have read the website and am a little annoyed with the company which actually denies responsibility for the use but not the composition of the product, this is the dioxin compound 2,3,7,8-TCDD, a byproduct of the manufacturing process used to produce 2,4,5-T one of the herbicides in agent orange. I have travelled a little up into the highlands of Vietnam both near the Chinese borders and the mid Vietnam Laotian side of the border to live with the Hmong and Zao tribes. Not that i know much, but i did observe this keeping an eye out for damage by pesticides etc. If you travel West from Da-nang and up towards the Laotian border areas, lets say near Hamburger hill for a ready Western reference point around thirty miles from that border where the Ho Chi Minh trail used to hook in as it did in many other places you start to recognize that the foliage changes. There are great swathes of normal foliage and then slowly there are swathes of gnarled off green colored foliage. This gnarled unusually colored foliage increases more and more in volume until near the border towns everything is completely gnarled. These areas are around the directly around the ho chi minh trail areas. It took me a little while to work out that nearly 50 years later the foliage has not recovered and looks like it won't. What though is a little scarier is the further you head West the more and more little children you see, born in the last five years that are deformed and oft crazed. Their faces are melted off hanging to the side, their heads are two to four times the size they should be on little bodies, not just one or two but many many, too many. This is nearly fifty years later and the children are being born like this. I have checked a little to make sure that they have not transported the children to those areas to show to the tourists for any reasons,(the areas i travel in there are generally few tourists but i double check as am not one to look for random unqualified facts to mold them into my idea). Also one has to be careful with the fact that some soldiers working in areas with chemical sprays returned home from elsewhere so transporting the problem. I can only conclude that the children and the forests are terribly affected by those chemicals fifty years later with astonishingly high deformed birth rates and forest destruction that is not able to properly grow back. So just a note to you from first hand experience without exaggerated claims or reading it in a book or seeing it on a documentary. I believe that the companies and the governments denial (if it is still that way) that anything was wrong is incorrect. It is there today and still occurring and can be visited without restriction to verify. cheers Karl."
Re: Up At The Ranch And Beyond
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