By Grant McCool

DONG HA, Vietnam, March 7 (Reuters) - In the same week that dozens of countries declared plans to ban cluster munitions, a boy was killed by the explosion of a steel ball he picked up and threw while tending livestock.

The boy was not in one of the present-day war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon, but in Vietnam, where the battlefields were silenced more than 30 years ago.

The American and Vietnamese armies left behind cluster bombs like the one that killed 15-year-old Pham Hoai Son and wounded another boy in both legs during February's Lunar New Year festival, traditionally time for celebration, not mourning.

"It is sinful that the war has an impact after all these years, that the bombs and the landmines are still there," the boy's distraught father, Pham Van Cuoi, said in the family's small concrete dwelling in rural Tu Chinh village about 40 km (25 miles) north of Dong Ha, capital of Quang Tri province.

The painstaking, dangerous work of removing unexploded ordnance, or UXO as it is known, is taking much longer in Vietnam than anyone wishes, researchers and ordnance experts say.

Explosives, rockets and shells still prey on peasant farmer families in their gardens, rice paddies, rivers and fields.

Scavengers who sell metal play with death searching for ordinance or storing munitions in disorderly scrapyards typical of Quang Tri, especially near the war-time demilitarised zone, and in nearby Quang Binh province in central Vietnam.

These provinces were targets for one of the heaviest aerial and sea bombardments in history in the 1960s and 70s war.

A paucity of information on casualties and the location of ordnance are cited by Vietnamese and international groups as among the obstacles to quickening the pace of clearance, despite improvements in technology and declining death tolls.

"In Quang Tri province at the current speed of the de-mining and the clearance level, it will take 100 years," said Hoang Nam, coordinator for Project Renew in Dong Ha, a group funded by the U.S.-based Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

Quang Tri, Quang Binh and Ha Tinh provinces have been jointly surveyed for ordnance by experts from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and a unit of the communist-run country's Defence Ministry.

They plan to survey and remove ordnance from more provinces this year, but an estimated 350,000 to 850,000 tonnes of weaponry remains scattered across all 64 provinces, government figures show.

BAN PROMISE

On Feb. 23, four days after the death of the Vietnamese teenager, 46 countries promised at a conference in Oslo, Norway, to try next year to introduce an international ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions.

In Quang Tri, 60 percent of families of victims live on or below the poverty line, earning less than three million dong ($190) a year by growing rice, peanuts and corn or raising pigs and cattle.

Groups such as Project Renew and Clear Path International provide bereavement grants, education scholarships, money for artificial limbs or to take up an occupation if they are able.

Since the U.S. war ended in April 1975, unexploded ordnance and landmines have killed 38,000 people and wounded 64,000 in Vietnam, government figures show.

The Oslo meeting was not attended by the big manufacturers, the United States, China and Russia. Other users and stockpilers such as Britain, France, Germany and Italy signed on.

Neither Vietnam, nor its similarly-afflicted Southeast Asian neighbours, Cambodia and Laos, attended, not because of lack of interest but due to lack of diplomatic capacity.

"A new treaty will include a section on assistance and cooperation," said Thomas Nash of the London-based Cluster Munition Coalition. "It is a priority for us to get these countries on board."

With Vietnam's economy rapidly expanding, there is a greater need to clear land of explosives that hinder farming and the building of houses and roads.

Children are especially vulnerable to cluster bombs because they might think the steel balls called BLU's (bomb live units) are toys. The BLU's detonate when they turn, set off by an internal fuse, releasing hundreds of pellets and metal shards.

SCRAPYARD CLEARANCE

According to ordnance experts such as Stephen Bradley of the British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG) charity, most of Vietnam's casualties are caused by this type of munition, which can explode above ground, on impact or delayed mode.

In early March, MAG field manager Mark Russell and a team of Vietnamese experts, some of them former scrap metal dealers and former soldiers, spent three days carefully removing 1,553 items of ordnance from a scrapyard in Quang Binh province. Four men were killed there in January while handling an undefused bomb.

Steel casings for 500-pound bombs, cluster munitions, ground-to-ground rockets and 37mm anti-aircraft shells were strewn around the yard next to houses.

Some items, including rocket motors and part of a helicopter engine and its rotor lay on an embankment next to the main national road as trucks, cars and other vehicles barrelled past.

"In every district we work in, we clear anything that we know about," says Bradley, a tall former British Army serviceman, dressed in MAG's trademark light brown uniform with skull and crossbones logo.

"That is not to say we will find all there is, that takes years, but we are reducing the threat by doing that."

Some of the people wounded by the ordnance have emerged as sports heroes with help from non-governmental organisations.

Le Thi Hoai Phuong was 17 when her left leg was blown off by an explosion while she and her father were ploughing. Now 31, she has an artificial leg.

Four years ago she took up running, the long jump and high jump and she became a champion, winning three gold medals at the 2005 Southeast Asian Para Games in the Philippines.

"To people who have a disability, I would like to say that you need to be strong in your mind," Phuong said. "Don't blame anyone. It's just your bad luck. Take the people's joy as your happiness." (Additional reporting by Ho Binh Minh)

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