Environmental issues in Vietnam
Officially, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam lists environmental issues to include land, water, geology and minerals, and seas and islands, amongst others.However, the commonplace impression of Vietnam as an ostensibly communist authoritarian state where social and community movements are either rare or do not have much effect on government or policy decisions has been demonstrated not to be the case.Part of the reason for the absence of a concerted, mobilized environmental movement in the past could be due to the extent of control wielded by the VCP over the country's civil sphere.As large as these numbers appear to be, the environmental issues which their contaminative elements have given rise to, although significant, have been shown to have limited[9] subsequent effects, such as consequences for planting crops on available arable land, based on World Bank data up to 2009.For example, David Biggs highlights in his environmental history of Central Vietnam that the effect of the War left on the landscape (what he calls "footprints"[11]) were not exclusively destructive, but also had constructive or creative dimensions as well.[12] Even in the present day, after fifty years of clean up have elapsed, it is foreign international bodies like the World Health Organization, rather than domestic ones, which continue to take the lead in the environmental movement to rectify the scars of military history on Vietnam's natural landscape.However, there is broad consensus that environmental issues began featuring more prominently in Vietnam's civic sphere following the Doi Moi reforms which were initiated from 1986 onwards by a new generation of more progressive Vietnamese political leaders.At one level, new types of environmental issues were created as a byproduct of new and increased economic activities, given that the primary objective of reforms was to boost business growth in an attempt to eradicate poverty.For example, while business and agricultural reforms led to the creation of more than 30,000 new private businesses and reduced the percentage of the Vietnamese population living under the poverty line from about 50 percent to 29 percent,[14] an environmental consequence of this growth reported in a 2003 publication jointly produced by MONRE, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Ministry of Fisheries was the conflict created between demands for land development and planning on the one hand, and area conservation plans on the other.While a more detailed discussion of the bauxite controversy will proceed in the following section, it suffices to note here that the case of the anti-bauxite movement could be used to demonstrate the limits of bottom-up pressures from environmental activists.Further on, the case of the environmental movement which pursued as its goal the preservation of the Reunification Park in Hanoi could show that civil society networks have developed in the Vietnamese context.[17] Moreover, the activities of the anti-bauxite environmental movement demonstrated the digitalization of social action, which has come to characterize how a wide range of other priority issues in contemporary Vietnamese civil society are being championed.