Globally, an estimated 70 million landmines lie beneath the surface, affecting over 70 countries worldwide. These cheap explosives are laid in the ground en masse, creating large patches of terrain that are deadly to cross, indiscriminately maiming or even killing anyone whether friend or foe, child or elderly, combatant or civilian. Since landmines can remain in the ground for an indefinite amount of time, in many cases people nowadays are being harmed by the weapons of a war fought decades prior. These distinctive traits of landmines are what makes them such a problem, causing a widespread humanitarian crisis in many countries that are still recovering from past wars.

The country plagued by this deadly disease the most is Myanmar, with landmine casualties being documented in all 14 of Myanmar's states. The Human Rights Watch has found that many of Myanmar's military forces have been using an increasing amount of anti-personnel mines, which are small pressure sensitive explosives targeted towards eliminating personnel, which have also been banned in the country for over 25 years. Combined with the spike in conflict between the Junta military, alliances of opposition and ethnic armed groups in the past year, Myanmar currently has the highest number of landmines deployed ever. This has undoubtedly resulted in the increase of land-mine related injury and deaths, with the rate significantly increasing by 1,003 documented cases in 2023, three times the rate of the previous year. Residents of Myanmar’s rural villages have brutally witnessed first hand, the unholy methods used by soldiers, where they would plant mines around crucial infrastructure such as houses and roads in villages where citizens were forced to flee, injuring  the residents weeks or months after as they return to their homes after the conflict subsided. In a specific incident in October of 2023, the Human Rights Watch interviewed 4 landmine survivors, all of which lost at least one of their legs, all of whom proceeded to say that they were injured during the process of fleeing or returning to their villages. Myanmar is only 1 of the 4 countries that are actively witnessing the use of anti-personnel mines, along with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which notably uses APMs against their own citizens.

Additionally, landmines also inflict a heavy socio-economic impact on the area they have been deployed in, making it harder to build infrastructure and causing stagnation in socio-economic development. Adding on, the areas which landmines are deployed in are often also commonly war-torn, making it incredibly hard for the societies affected by war to recover from its costly impacts. One clear example of this is landmines' lasting impact in the agricultural sector. In Eastern Ukraine, many landmines were deployed as the result of the Russo-Ukraine War. Because of this many local farmers have been displaced due to the risk of injury and loss of life, making them  unable to maintain their farms. Despite the war dying down in some areas, the threat of landmines still remains as there is no telling whether or not the large fields have been trapped. Meanwhile in Tajikistan, a country heavily reliant on the exportation of its agricultural sector of wheat and cotton, an estimated 70% of the population depends on agriculture as a source of employment and thus income. Unfortunately, with the ongoing landmine-caused humanitarian crisis, about half a million people or 10% of the total population, is at risk of direct physical harm.

On the bright side, there have been many solutions to the issue of landmines. The main limiting factor that impedes the elimination of landmines is the extreme margin of cost between the deployment and removal of mines, with estimates of 10,000$ per landmine removed versus a 3$ per landmine placed. In addition, some solutions just cannot compete with the rate at which landmines are being deployed, forcing a reliance on future innovation to make landmine removal faster, cheaper, and effective.

One such effective solution is the HeroRat Program developed by the APOPO (Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development). This program focuses on training African Giant Pouched Rats to seek out landmines. These “HeroRATs” are first deployed alongside traditional landmine removal methods, in order to speed up the process significantly. A HeroRAT can search the area of a tennis court within minutes, in comparison to the 4 days it takes for a human deminer to search the same area. Since, APOPO’s HeroRATs are trained to only detect the scent of explosive material, it grants them a much higher efficiency as human demining uses a metal detector, which often miss detects scrap metal, greatly hindering the speed, which is a weakness the rats do not have. These HeroRATs take around 1 year to train, in which the rats are cared for well, receiving a healthy diet, lots of social interaction, rest time, and are carefully monitored by a team of veterinarians, making the program extremely ethical from an animal rights perspective. The rats are also not in large danger during the mine removal process, as their bodies are simply too light to trigger any mines. APOPO has destroyed around 170,000 landmines, clearing almost 120,000,000 square meters of land, and removing more than 2 million people from the threat of land mines.

In conclusion, landmines are a quite dangerous issue brought upon as a consequence of war. Their impact is long lasting, resulting in countless unintended casualties to people simply returning to their homes. They also increase the struggle within  societies already recovering from post-war impacts, increasing their socio-economic burden. However, new solutions to landmines are being developed, such as the aforementioned HeroRAT program, which will hopefully be applied more widely in the future to combat the existence of landmines.

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