Bangkok (AlertNet) Â? It started out as an opportunity to make a chunk of pocket money for the five boys but ended in a horrible tragedy: two dead, one burnt and one unconscious.
All they were trying to do was salvage scrap metal from a bomb casing near a small village in southern Laos.
If only they had just collected all the shards and left the rusty cylinder alone, they may have walked away with $25, a huge amount of money in a country where most people are subsistence farmers living on less than $1 a day.
But the boys thought the cylinder alone could fetch three dollars.
The incident, which occurred in August 2008 and recounted in a recent study conducted by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Mines Advisory Group (MAG) in Khammouane Province, is typical of the kind of risks Lao villagers face.
Laos has the dubious honour of being the most bombed country in the world.
Between 1963 and 1974, the U.S. military dropped over two million tonnes of bombs on the tiny southeast Asian country of just under seven million people.
The majority were cluster bombs, 30 percent of which failed to explode, according to the National Regulatory Authority (NRA) for unexploded ordnance (UXO) and Mine Action.
Largely aimed at destroying enemy supply lines during the Vietnam War over three decades ago, these war remnants have remained on Lao soil, contaminating one in four villages and killing or injuring over 50,000 people so far. Today, over 40 percent of casualties are children.
A family business
Â?Anyone over the age of five who can walk collects the unexploded bombs,Â? Sara Alexander, CRS program manager for Laos, told AlertNet.
Â?People need to have other options for earning a living. If your only option is to engage in risky business, like scrap metal collection, then that is what you do.Â?
Proceeds from sale of scrap metal can make up a significant source of income for many families, especially during months of food shortages.
Although officially illegal, most uses primitive ten-dollar Vietnamese metal detectors and small shovels to search the ground while others only pick it up when they see it.
The collectors then sell it to scrap metal dealers, who in turn passed it to foundries, which melt them down and turn them into reinforcing bars used in construction.
Tom Morgan, MAGÂ?s regional information officer, said, Â?Estimates vary, but perhaps one third of all UXO accidents are the result of collecting scrap.Â?
Accident records for 2008 are not yet complete, but it seems casualty figures may have doubled to about 600, Morgan said, possibly as a result of high prices for metal resulting in an increase in scrap metal collection.
At the height of its demand in mid-2008, the price of scrap was around 3,000 kip/kg ($0.36), MAG said.
Curbing the demand
In a private foundry on the outskirts of Phonsavanh in Xieng Khouang province in northern Laos, MAG sorted through five years' worth of scrap metal and discovered more than 24,000 live items. This is the final destination for much of the scrap collected in the province, one of the worst affected areas.
For 10 months, the agency worked with the foundry owners and scrap metal dealers to make UXO an unacceptable type of scrap metal.
"They still buy other types of war scrap such as shrapnel, but they wonÂ?t buy UXO anymore,Â? Morgan said.
However, with abundant supply of scrap in many Lao villages aid workers said a mixture of education and continued clearance is required to stop this practice. The price of scrap has fallen sharply to around 1,000 kip/kg ($0.12) this year but many fear people will start collecting again once the prices go up.
Changing the equation
Mike Boddington, a veteran in UXO-victim assistance and technical adviser to the NRA, stressed that villagers, who have been clearing mines in their backyards long before international aid agencies and donors came knocking on the door, will be the best people to continue the work if funding for clearance dries up.
Most of the scrap comes from bomb fragments rather than whole UXO, so its collection is both safe and an important source of income for villagers, he said.
Â?After 15 years of official clearance operations, we have managed to clear about 400,000 (of an estimated 80 million cluster bombs still in Laos),Â? Boddington told AlertNet. Â?If you do the sums, youÂ?ll find that in order to clear all of the bombs in this country, it will take 3,000 years.Â?
What Laos needs, he says, is to train villagers on how to clear mines safely.
Currently, Laos spends $25 million a year on different aspects of UXO and about $15 million to $16 million on clearance.
Â?In my personal opinion, if we were to take half of the money used for clearance to really thoroughly train five people in every single contaminated village or area, and we reinforced the village health system to deal with trauma when accidents occur and ban children from any form of scrap collection, weÂ?ll have a more effective service.Â?
Boddington said making sure people in remote villages do not collect scrap or use metal detectors would be a tall order for any law enforcement official.
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