No urgency over pollution

Alarming state: A man riding a motorbike amid smoke from a burning garbage dump on the outskirts of Hanoi. 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 see through a thick blanket of smog. — AFP

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,” she said.

“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 Organisation 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 and 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.

Hanoi has frequently sat at the top of IQAir’s ranking of the world’s most-polluted major cities and been 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. — AFP