Vietnam drags feet over 'urgent' pollution problem

Vietnam drags feet over 'urgent' pollution problem

A woman covers her face as she rides a motorbike past a burning garbage dump on the side of the road in Hanoi

Toxic smoke billows from a burning mound of plastic bags and leaves on Le Thi Huyen's farm in Hanoi, a city battling an alarming air pollution surge that the communist government appears in no hurry to fix.

In the last three months the Vietnamese capital has regularly topped a list of the world's most polluted major cities, leaving its nine million residents struggling to breathe and even to see through a thick blanket of smog.

Despite a string of ambitious plans to address the crisis, few measures have been enforced and there is little monitoring of whether targets are actually achieved, analysts say.

Officially, the burning of rice straw and waste was banned in 2022 across the country -- but that is news to Huyen.

"I've never heard of the ban," Huyen told AFP. "If we don't burn, what should we do with it?" she said, glancing at her smouldering heap of waste.

The stench of smoke and burning plastic is a constant feature of life in many Hanoi districts.

The country's poor air quality -- which kills at least 70,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)-- is also linked to its coal power plants, the rising number of factories, high usage of petrol motorbikes and constant construction.

Vietnam is a manufacturing powerhouse with a soaring economy and energy needs to match, but its growth has come at a cost, particularly in its buzzing capital whose geography compounds its air quality woes.

However, unlike in other prominent Asian cities battling pollution, such as Delhi or Bangkok, life in Hanoi goes on as normal no matter how bad the air. 

Authorities do not close schools. There is no work-from-home scheme.

The government -- which has close links to powerful economic interests, analysts say -- has also imprisoned independent journalists and environmentalists who have pushed for faster solutions.

- Call for action -

Hanoi has frequently sat at the top of IQAir's ranking of the world's most polluted major cities and was rated among the top 10 polluted capitals by the Swiss monitoring company in 2023.

Breathing the toxic air has catastrophic health consequences, with the WHO warning strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory diseases can be triggered by prolonged exposure.

The World Bank estimates that air pollution -- which returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023 -- costs Vietnam more than $13 billion every year, equivalent to almost three percent of the country's GDP last year.

"The situation is urgent," said Muthukumara Mani, World Bank lead environmental economist, based in Hanoi.

Even state media, after years of near silence on air quality, has become noticeably vocal in Vietnam, a one-party state.

VietnamNet, the official news site of the ministry of information and communications, published a rare call for action in January, warning air pollution was "a crisis demanding immediate attention".

Authorities declined to talk to AFP but Mani said there was recognition of the problem "at the highest level in the country", citing a trip to China made by senior Hanoi officials to learn how Beijing fixed its once-awful air.

While Hanoi has floated the idea of low-emission zones and devised an action plan that aims for "moderate" or better air quality on 75 percent of days annually, it is not clear whether either will be enforced.

"The issue sometimes with Vietnam is that people pay much more attention to targets than what's actually being delivered," said Bob Baulch, professor of economics at RMIT University Vietnam.

- Repression -

Tran Thi Chi had years of breathing difficulties before she made the difficult decision to uproot from the city centre house where she lived for more than a decade.

"The air in Hanoi had become so thick that I felt like I didn't have oxygen to breathe," said the 54-year-old, one of the first of her friends to buy an air purifier.

But millions of others have no choice but to live with the noxious air, prompting environmental activists to push for faster change -- until authorities launched a crackdown.

Nguy Thi Khanh, founder of GreenID, one of Vietnam's most prominent environmental organisations, was a rare voice challenging Hanoi's plans to increase coal power to fuel economic development, before she was jailed in 2022.

Four other environmentalists were also imprisoned between 2022 and 2023. 

"This repression has had a chilling effect that has made it virtually impossible for people to advocate for the government to address the problem of air pollution," said Ben Swanton of The 88 Project, which advocates for freedom of expression in Vietnam.

Vietnam has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which should help improve air quality, but government statistics show coal imports were up 25 percent last year compared to 2023.

Chi is fearful for the city she has always loved.

"We need urgent, realistic measures from authorities," she said. 

"We have no time to wait around."

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Originally published as Vietnam drags feet over 'urgent' pollution problem