Between 1963 and 1972, during the Vietnam War, at least 270 million cluster submunitions were dropped on Laos. Tens of millions of them failed to detonate. Over 20,000 Laotians have been maimed or killed by cluster submunitions since the official end of the war in 1973. About 80% of the country's 6.8 million citizens are subsistence farmers, which means that thousands of them are daily farming land dangerously contaminated with cluster submunitions and other unexploded ordnance.
