Over 57 mln USD needed for UXO clearance in Lao in next 5 years

Lao government needs more than 470 billion kip (some 57 million U.S. dollars) for unexplored ordnance (UXO) clearance efforts planned for the next five years (2017-2021), a survey has revealed.

Chief of the UXO Clearance Section, National Regulatory Authorities for the UXO/Mine Action Sector in the Lao PDR (NRA) Office, Phommachanh Khammanichanh presented a UXO clearance plan at a meeting in Vientiane on Wednesday.

"More than 10 million U.S. dollars is needed annually for UXO clearance for every 4,500 hectares of confirmed hazardous area (CHA). The current nationwide CHA is 29,000 ha," said the official.

According to Lao News Agency's report on Friday, there are 108 operational UXO clearance teams in the country and each team can clear 41 ha of UXOs per year.

Planned UXO clearance efforts have been approved by the government for 2016-2020 for 20 national development priority areas, 71 local development priority areas, 145 settlement areas, and 213 large communities.

Lao government plans to conduct non-technical surveys in more than 3,100 villages, including resurveys in 300 villages by 2019.

So far this year, a total of 3,225 ha of land were cleared. This includes 2,214 ha of agricultural land and over 1,000 ha of land set for development.

Since 2016, more than 86,000 UXO items were destroyed, non-technical surveys have been conducted in 735 villages, and technical surveys have been completed in 12,993 villages.

From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, more than was dropped during World War II. Tests in the United States have found that these types of cluster munitions can have a failure rate of up to 30 percent.

During that time, about 580,000 secret bombing missions were carried out over Laos. A quarter of all villages are contaminated with UXO, the impact of which is particularly visible in the poorest districts in Laos. Endit