WHAT WE DO
Environment Program
Through our Environment Program, we are working to ensure that people can access affordable, high-quality food and land and that they can live and work in safe and healthy environments.
Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. sprayed 12 million gallons of Dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange, in addition to 8 million gallons of other herbicides, on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—an average of 5,200 gallons a day for 3,735 days.
By the end of the defoliation program in 1971, nearly 20,000 sorties had been flown. Over 7,813 square miles of upland and mangrove forests and 781 square miles of crops (an area roughly the size of New Hampshire) were destroyed. In total, more than 66,000 square miles of South Vietnam, along with large areas of
Laos and parts of Cambodia, were impacted.
Improving access to a safer and healthier environment—a land that is freed of explosive remnants of
war and toxic herbicides—will allow us to accelerate the progress toward a world free of conflict and of war’s many legacies.
We work with the Assistance for Nature Conservation and Community Development Center and Forester, Phung Tuu Boi, to enable villagers of Dong Son Hamlet, A Luoi District, Thua Thien Hue Province, Viet Nam, to restore biodiversity to this heavily sprayed region and increase livelihoods, as well as to return the relationship between people and land to a pre-war state.
How we get there:
And more than seven million tons of bombs were dropped, as part of the U.S. airpower-dominated war, on Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. Millions of these bombs did not detonate upon impact.
Rattan Project
We are working with 95 families in Dong Son, in Viet Nam, to plant rattan in their home gardens and forest plots. We support training in planting, harvesting and regenerating rattan seedlings and in marketing their products, so that their agricultural yields can help them generate income.
Compost Project
We are helping many families, small villages in the Dong Son Hamlet, in Viet Nam, and others elsewhere in Viet Nam and Laos, to wean from their dependency on chemical fertilizer in their agricultural practices by providing and building composting bins for all, household and animal, waste.
Restoring Native Species
We are working with Phung Tuu Boi to reintroduce native species of trees and shrubs to the A Luoi Valley. Villagers receive saplings, including long-growing trees that grew in the Valley before the war, to help diversify trees in their forest plots.