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State censorship of the Formosa Vietnam case

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Ortmann (2023, p.8):

The Formosa protest one year later provides a contrasting case study [to protest against the Vinh Tan coal power plant] to understand when repression is a strategic choice by the regime. The protest occurred in response to massive pollution caused by the Taiwanese steel producer Formosa-Ha Tinh Steel. Perhaps the most important difference was the media coverage. While the Vinh Tan protest had garnered significant, relatively objective coverage in the Vietnamese press, the Formosa case was highly censored, and whatever can be found is highly biased against the protesters who were supposedly only interested in harming Viet Nam’s national interests. To understand what happened, it is necessary to draw on foreign media, which covered the protests over many months, as well as other academic sources.

Transnational Formosa Activism in Vietnam

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In social science literature, the Formosa Vietnam disaster is considered a key example for the importance of transnational environmental advocacy networks (Fan et al. 2021). Catholic priests and the US-based organization Justice for Formosa Victims (JfFV) have called for the release of imprisoned activists and for adequate compensation of impacted fisheries. More recently, after several attempts to gain jurisdiction in Vietnam, a group of 7,800 plaintiffs launched a civil lawsuit against Formosa in Taiwan’s supreme court. Beyond the repression experienced by activists in Vietnam, lawyers involved in the case have cited limited recourse to international law in Taiwan, expensive court filing fees, and other bureaucratic measures as challenges to the lawsuit.

2016 Vietnam marine disaster

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In 2012, Formosa began construction of the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant in Central Vietnam. Initially, the facility was meant to be built next to the Yunlin County Complex, but concern over water pollution – especially threats to Taiwan’s white dolphin population (Winkler 2019) – pushed the project abroad. Only shortly after the steel plant began operating in 2016, the release of toxic chemicals polluted an estimated 150 miles of Vietnam’s coastline. The death of hundreds of tons of fish and job loss of an estimated 50,000 – 100,000 fisher people marked a turning point for Vietnamese environmental movements and politics (Jobin 2020). After several weeks of silence, Formosa took public responsibility for the disaster and paid $500 million in compensation to the government. However, anger over the magnitude of the disaster and unequal distribution of funds led to large scale protest movements across the country. The government responded with violent police interventions, imprisonment of protestors, and tight control over media reporting, casting activists as agents of outside forces (Ortmann 2021, 288). Social scientists Stephan Ortmann explains the severity of this response with the nationwide spread of protests, exacerbated by the protestors' use of decentralized social media and involvement by the Catholic church, as well as international attention, all of which posed serious challenges to the legitimacy of Vietnam’s government (Ortmann 2021, 300).

TebbeM Desert StoryMaps Question 5

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  • In 2003, the Imperial Irrigation District signed the Quantification Settlement Agreement, in which they transferred the water from agricultural runoff that formerly fed the Salton Sea to supply municipalities in Southern California. The agreement kept water flowing into the lake until 2018 in order to give time to come up with ways to mitigate environmental effects of the lake's desiccation. These solutions have not materialized.
  • UCR scientists are collecting dust for microbial analysis

TebbeM Desert StoryMaps Question 2

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  • Increased salinity
    • Waterfowl dieoffs
  • Desiccation produces toxic dust that blows
    • Childhood asthma and other respiratory conditions
    • 15% of Imperial County residents have asthma
    • wind-blown dust can act as a pathway for microbes, fungi, and viruses to enter lungs by attaching to dust particles
  • Municipal sewage from Mexicali
  • Waste from prisons

TebbeM Desert StoryMaps Question 5.2

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The "Disparities in Environmental Exposures and Health Impacts" project has four goals:

  1. To establish a community advisory board to provide local stakeholder input;
  2. To identify spatial patterns and trends in population exposure and in pollutant transport;
  3. To distribute particle collectors at sites that represent the range of sources of particulate matter and to identify the elemental and biological composition of particles;
  4. To use environmental chamber exposure studies to develop a protocol for monitoring pulmonary inflammation impacts of aerosol particulates identified from the particle collectors.