Thanks to Dewayne Johnson’s recent win against Monsanto, the country of Vietnam is now demanding that Monsanto pay compensation to the victims of Agent Orange (the poison the company supplied to the US military during the Vietnam War).
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During the war, our government told military personnel that the chemical herbicide and defoliant was safe and would “deprive Viet Cong guerrilla fighters of food and concealment.” 1 However, we now know that Dioxin, a highly toxic element of Agent Orange, has been linked to cancers and birth defects. Something the people of Vietnam are still dealing with.
Nguyen Phuong Tra, a spokesman for Vietnam’s foreign ministry, said.
“The verdict serves as a legal precedent which refutes previous claims that the herbicides made by Monsanto and other chemical corporations in the US and provided for the US army in the war are harmless. Vietnam has suffered tremendous consequences from the war, especially with regard to the lasting and devastating effects of toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange.”2
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For their part, Monsanto has argued that the “…government set the specifications for making Agent Orange and determined when, where and how it was used” 3 and that they were one of nine government contractors who manufactured the chemical.
The company founded in St Louis, Missouri, in 1901 was recently acquired by Bayer AG.
