Analyze

Characterization of loss from Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development (2018) within the Evaluation report on 10-year implementation of the national policy for ‘agriculture-farmer-rural’ development [ not available for public view] 

• “ Aquaculture households have lost 503.2 million VND (21,665 USD) per household, then fishing households 231.3 million VND (9958 USD) per household, and coastal service households 102.0 million VND (4392 USD) per household. Note that both fishing and fish farming households lost similar por- tions of their total income, around 98 percent, even as fish farmers earn twice that of fishers on average. In a country where the average yearly income of rural households is 130 million VND or 5600 USD (MARD, 2018), losing an average of 11,000 USD per household is significant.” (Truong et al., 2021, p 8). 

Characterization of the compensation schemes adopted by Vietnam’s government:

• “According to a report by the Ministry of Finance in 2018, the government was able to provide direct cash compensation to those identified as being impacted across the four provinces. This is because of the settlement with Taiwan Formosa Plastics for 500 million USD. In addition to cash, the Vietnamese government gave over 19,000 tonnes of rice to impacted households in the months following the fish kill. The government also monitored the safety of the ocean environment. As the government switched from emergency relief to recovery support, more programmes were introduced including loan access, scholarships for students, health insurance, and livelihood training pro- grammes. The government also worked with the Fisheries Department and other relevant agencies to build environmental monitoring systems, provide consistent water testing, engage in food safety monitoring, and work towards ecological rehabilitation of aquatic stocks” (Truong et al., 2021, p 10). 

“Environmental disasters have a tendency to further increase work precarity, particularly in places that are highly dependent on eco- logical resources (Marschke et al., 2020). Livelihoods, as such, may need to transform rather than persist in the face of crises (Alexander, 2013).” (Truong, 2021, pg 3)

“ Vietnam has struggled with ineffective environmental regulatory programmes or insufficient enforcement capabilities to ensure adequate protection of the environment as Vietnam develops (Fortier, 2010). Environmental impact assessments (EIA), in general, are viewed as bureaucracy rather than as an important aspect of the development approval process (Wells-Dang et al., 2016).” (Truong, 2021, pg 4)

The narrative of the text highlights the following key points extrapolated from survey responses and interview participants:

• Impacts of the Formosa disaster on households vary by livelihood strategies, and were particularly amplified for poorer households, women, and households without diversified livelihood strategies. 

• Coping mechanisms of households primarily involved reducing household expenditures, accessing loans, adopting a new livelihood strategy, and expanding existing livelihood strategies. However, adoption rates of these coping mechanisms vary across households with livelihoods across the service, fishing, and fish farming enterprises. 

• Compensation, though cited to have ignited protests from parties not qualified for restitution, did offer substantial help to those who were able to receive compensation. Additionally, compensation delivery was delayed (between one to two years after the incident was reported), further escalating impacts across families without savings. 

• Economic recovery of household income 30 months after the Formosa incident indicates that the majority of households have recovered their livelihood activities. However, this does not take into account families who are no longer in the region (out migrated following the disaster prior to the inception of this study).

Authors of the publication have affiliations to the Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry and the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. The funding for this study comes from the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development.

The documentary is missing because the documentary is as safe as the fence it mocks in its title.
In the beginning we are asked to bear witness to the construction and use of the most devastation weapon of indiscriminate death the world has ever seen, and all the harm the construction of such a tool, yet its construction and its use is justified near instantaneously by repeating the same old propaganda.
In continuation, we are asked to bear witness to the continuous production of similar weapons and the devastation caused by the mishandling of the waste that accumulated in their production, yet why such a production took place is not only left unquestioned, but simple hints of cold war propaganda is left in their places for safekeeping.
In the end, we are asked to bear witness to a sombre victory, same spectres of patriotism and nation-of-God watching over our shoulder, yet how the pitiful situation of being forced to celebrate even such a small victory is never explored.
To sum up, we are shown people, good people, who struggle against the symptoms of a disease, yet this disease itself never named, nor challenged. It could not have been challenged, as it would force a complete change in their discourse.

If we sincerely would like to critique how the bodies of these workers were made disposable; used, harmed, dislocated and discharged as deemed necessary; if we wish to explore this topic as the necropolitical issue it is, we cannot stop halfway through. This inability to stop chasing connections, relationalities wherever it fits our ideology, is not a call for “objectivism”, it’s a call to respect the term of Anthropocene with all its rhizomatic connections.

An investigation of nuclear waste, that does not factor the use of its product, the socio-political effects of said product, and the historical conditions that even led to the possibility of producing it in such ways and such quantities, are of no use for us.  It cannot penetrate the barrier of capitalist realism. If it could, at least a single mention of workers unions would have existed. Instead, it has confessionals by atomic weapons lawyers whose heart goes out to these workers.
An America that refuse to face up to the fact that it is what it is by the great necropolitical project it led for hundreds of years, I struggle to accumulate sympathy for, what I can easily accumulate is rage however, which this documentary is missing..
Wish the documentary would have at least attempted to say something radical, instead of praising these disposable bodies for being patriotic about it. There are lives who never had false fences built as idols for safety, the collective idols of old America, the patriotic nation under God were built upon their broken bodies, what would you ask of them?

One of the reasons for the specific nature of data and knowledge management in this context is the economic necessity and attractiveness of stable, high paying employment. In terms of the beginning of the accumulation of local knowledge regarding the risks to which the workers and the neighbors were being exposed to, this clearly played a role. For fear of losing their good paying jobs, and due to the military nature of their occupation, workers never told anything about their jobs to their families, or didn't ask questions that could have led to uncomfortable answers. This dynamic continued later, as we can see by the testimony of the worker who worked on the clean-up of the Weldon Springs site. The Priest also notes that in the neighborhood, people were wary of information leaking, as it might depreciate their property values.

Something else which we can observe is that, on top of the economic necessity for preserving one's job, there is also a sentiment of pride in doing one's work properly. A worker recalls that the relationship that the workers had to having to wear blue (and reduce your actions because you were contaminated) was that it was just part the job, and that they had a job to do. After the Weldon springs plant closed, there was a liberation of voices, and it was easier to report health concerns. The sentiment of pride in doing ones work properly is completed by a sentiment of patriotism. The same worker, Mr Schneider, said: "We have to believe what our government tells us, what the heck, uh. Best country in the world, I still think it is." Another example of the relationship between the job and the risk is the testimony of the clean-up worker who said that they shut of their Geiger counters, because they were "just going nuts". Here we can see that when the risk is too high, it becomes less visible, less understandable, because it is inescapable. Another reason for the difficulty of accumulating and sharing information, at least until the 1990s, is the priority of beating the communists. The discourse of emergency and national priority is not conducive to asking questions (as we can observe today in different ways).

The closing of the Weldon Springs plant coincided with the rise of environmental concerns in the USA and the change in environmental perspective had an impact on the categorization of places such as the Weldon Springs one, which became a Superfund site. This required a change in management at the department of energy because they started needing to have conversations and interactions with the public. This did not solve all the knowledge management problems however, because the measures put in place to deal with the injustices were insufficient compared to the nature of the events that had unfolded.

This is for multiple reasons. The first the nature of the risk means that the production of knowledge and regulations was complicated by a lack of understanding of the different medical pathways, conditions, and interactions which lead to the development of health problems. The number of people affected is also quite small, so the statistics may not appear to be significant. The second is the complexity of the accumulation of data in order to gain reparation and recognition, something which led to a movement to make the process more collective, in order to support the data finding and management process and make the knowledge of the administrative procedures consolidated. Finally, there were instances where the records of employee exposure were falsified, which meant that the access to this information was impossible.

One question that is brought up in the documentary which compelled me is the quesiton of knowing how to mark the borders of acceptable risk. While at the beginning of the nuclear production operations, the question is not raised so much, it comes into play later, when the environmental movements have influenced the governance of the USA enough that the clean-up becomes a question answerable through policy. It is at that point that multiple tensions arise. First, there is the tension between the perception of risk that the workers who worked in the factories had and the outwards sign of protection that the workers doing the clean up wear. And second, once risk is acknowledged, a tension arises related to the extent of risk, and the areas which need to be protected.  As the priest recalls,  people visiting the clean-up site, were in laymen's clothing on one side of the fence, and on the other side of the fence, people were in moon suits. Similarly, a clean-up worker recalls that the houses where they stayed during their time at work were just on the other side of the fence from the clean up site where they had to wear protective gear.

Another tension which intrigued me in this documentary is between the representation of exposed workers as heroes and as victims. This is something which arises of another context which is mentioned in this documentary which is the military, and some of the exposed workers are veterans. Faced with life altering situations, it is without a doubt useful to have a construction which permits the making of meaning and the perception of oneself as honorable, but it should be investigated what the impact of patriotism and loyalty to country is on perception of risk and injustice. 

The last question which intrigued me in this documentary is that of the construction of the deterrent/protective structure on the nuclear waste site. The priest raises an interesting point when he asks whether the best use of the money spent was in constructing this structure that would, according to him, be attractive to children, instead of providing financial support and health care to the people affected by the radiation. It really made me question the value of creating an attractive memorial like structure, and the discourse it conveys on the nature of the events which unfolded there. And of course, the classic question of the management of essential message bearing structures that wil long outlive us.

The original labor of this quotidian Anthropocene is the labor of weapon production. The economy of war produced a situation where workers' security or the environment was absolutely not the main priority. As someone said in the documentary, there was no reason for workers not to be protected as early as 1942. After the war, work had to be put in to construct more permanent buildings which would improve worker safety and allow better control of the uranium purification process. Another form of labor was put in to structure the practices of control of worker's contamination.

Another labor, which was provoked by the anthropocenics in this situation is that of the medical professionals who surrounded and treated the workers. For example, Mr Schneider's first cancer was discovered by his chiropractor.

Another provoked labor is the activist labor of the workers, children and activist who are impacted by the health risks of working in those factories. The paperwork and administrative labor required to obtain compensation for health impacts is very high, and requires expert help, organizing in a collective was another labor which permitted the previous ones, and allowed for the pooling of ressources and knowledge to properly defend the rights of workers. A labor which is related to this one is the labor of workers' unions to fight for accurate representation of the risks entailed by the employment of their members and to support the protection of workers.

Related to the labor within the factories themselves is the labor of clean-ups, which contained some of the same risks, with more protection and less exposure time than the original problem producing labor. There is also the labor of knowledge production and risk assessment by individual workers who were coerced in putting their livelihoods above their health. One worker says he had severe nosebleeds on the job and was warned/threatened by his supervisor that he would be fired if he told someone about it.

The final labor that I noticed being covered in this documentary is the labor of everyday clean up. Some people recall cleaning radioactive dust off of their laundry that they set to dry outside, and someone else recalls her brother cleaning the dust off his car in the morning.

At Madison Site, the residents of Calpin streets compiled data of residents living nearby the plant that got cancer. So this was a kind of data collection/ archiving of the residents. They had a list of the illnesses of residents near the plant and they found over 70 cases of cancer on the Calpin streets and 114 Cases of Cancer in the surrounding blocks (around 1h24min). Through this data collection, it was possible for residents to become active and gain the knowledge about what is going on: they became informed and political in this way.

That the body of the workers acts as an indicator for safety conditions at their workplace can also be seen in this film. Particularly impressive I found the passage (approx. at min 30), where it is said that the employees who were too strongly exposed to the radiation and therefore were dismissed, after their dismissal still received their wage – but, as the person interviewed stresses, not due to charity, but to prevent that this worker does urine and blood tests in order to get a new job. Cause in these urine and blood tests the too high levels of exposure in the former plant could become visible – and the company wanted to impede that this happens. So I think what is very interesting here, is the fact, that the exposure is inscribed in the body – and that this is not something, that leads into an action of protecting this body or to a fundamental change of how this work is done – but lead the companies to hide this inscription when it is in their interest.