Vietnam drags feet over urgent pollution problem

HANOI – Toxic smoke billows from a burning mound of plastic bags and leaves on Ms 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 Ms Huyen.

“I’ve never heard of the ban,” she 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 Organisation (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.

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

The government – which has close links to powerful economic