Too often the roar of an aircraft engine was associated with the thunder of bombs […] commercial aviation is, as it were, a rehabilitation of aviation before humanity – wrote the authors of the 1969 publication Lotnictwo gospodarcze (Commercial Aviation). Unfortunately – technologies developed to increase food production and protect forests were also used as chemical weapons.
Agricultural aviation techniques were used by the United States Air Force during the Second Indochina War (1964–75). Fighting the guerrilla tactics of the North Vietnamese Army, the USAF decided to use spraying techniques employed in agricultural aviation. Defoliants were applied – substances that cause plants to shed their leaves – in order to deprive the enemy of the cover provided by the lush vegetation of the subtropical zone, and of food obtained from local farmers. Between 1962 and 1971, Operation Ranch Hand was conducted, applying highly toxic “rainbow herbicides” on a large scale, including the infamous Agent Orange, in very high concentrations. They were produced by the same chemical corporations that supplied American and New Zealand agriculture.
These substances contained carcinogenic dioxins. The result of the operation was the destruction or damage of 22 km2 of forests and croplands, and hundreds of thousands of people suffering from diseases and body deformities caused by contamination. Such massive use of agricultural aviation techniques in connection with an armed conflict has not been repeated; however, aerial spraying is used, for example, to destroy crops from which illegal drugs are produced, particularly in the case of plantations located in hard-to-reach places. Thus, military service did not bypass agricultural aircraft. Moreover, in some countries, firefighting flights are carried out by the air force, which for this purpose organises units equipped with agricultural aircraft. An example is the Hellenic Air Force (Polemikí Aeroporía), which uses Polish PZL M-18B Dromader aircraft.
When the ecology of an area is disrupted on a large scale, a chain of irreversible events is set in motion, which affects agriculture and consequently the population long after the war has ended. — Kim Coleman*
