A new law was needed to tackle water pollution, participants agreedat a workshop on policy and law on controls of water pollution held inHanoi on May 18.

The call came after a healthministry report that each year 9,000 people die and 200,000 others arediagnosed with cancers because of using polluted water.

Nguyen Ngoc Ly, director of the Centre for Environmental and CommunityResearch (CECR), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Hanoi,said water pollution has been institutionalised in several legaldocuments, however the problem has not been solved and now seems to havegone out of hand.

She said the Law on EnvironmentalProtection and the Law on Water Resources, which govern this issue, aretoo generic and this leads to poor enforcement.

"Further, inconsistent provisions on ways to control water pollution inthese laws created confusion about whom, what and how they target," shesaid.

Ly added another problem is that the currentlaws do not detail the technology to be used for water pollutiontreatment, which is a loophole where State money could be spent onoutdated technology. Corruption is also often involved.

Nguyen Van Bay, director of Department of Water Resources Management(DWRM) under the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment(MONRE) admitted that limited human and financial resources and poorawareness and law compliance are to blame for water pollution.

He suggested the Government add criminal penalties for acts ofpolluting water resources, increase fines, build a national system formonitoring activities, and publicise the names of establishments thatcause pollution or threaten the environment.

A DWRMreport shows that most of the main rivers in Vietnam are polluted. Italso says that agricultural chemicals (pesticides, herbicides andfertilisers) and animal feeds and their residues are deposited on thebeds of rivers and ponds.

It said these are thebreeding ground for pathogens and harmful algae in surface water andtheir percolation through the soil contaminates groundwater.

DWRM statistics show that 70 percent of industrial parks in Vietnamhave no waste facilities or substandard waste-water facilities.

Out of the nation's 639 industry clusters, which are a smaller versionof industrial parks or industrial estates, only 42 possess aconcentrated waste water system.

Almost all craft villages throughout the country discharge waste water directly into rivers, canals and ponds.

Vietnam has 3,450 rivers that are longer than 10 kilometres. It alsohas 2,900 lakes and reservoirs with a total holding capacity of 65billion cubic metres.-VNA