In face of an alarming decline in birth rate in Ho Chi Minh City, the General Department of Population and Family Planning has recommended that every couple should have two children. The recommendation was made on July 17 after the agency reviewed a reality that the birth rates in many provinces and cities in Vietnam have declined to an alarming level, in which most women have only one child, said Duong Quoc Trong, head of the Population and Family Planning General Department. The family planning policy applied in the past 50 years has led to a sharp decline in the country’s birth rate. In 1961, a Vietnamese woman had 6.3 children on average. The figure dropped to 2.06 in 2006 and to 1.99 in 2011. Last year, the figure slightly increased to 2.05 but it is still lower the replacement rate, 2.1, Trong said. The replacement rate is the degree to which a population is replacing itself, based on the ratio of the number of female babies to the number of women of childbearing, he explained. Birth rates are different in different localities, of which HCMC has the lowest rate: 1.33 children per woman in the reproductive age. In other southern localities, such as Long An, Tien Giang, Hau Giang, Ca Mau, and Can Tho, the birth rates range between 1.5 and 1.6. Meanwhile, many northern and central provinces have much higher rates, 3-3.4. “When the fertility rate declines to 1.3, then it is very hard to increase it to the replacement rate and as a result, the population will age rapidly and the society will lack people in working age. For that reason, I encourage couples in HCMC to have two children,” Trong said. He emphasized, “We do not suggest that every couple has three children, but they should not stop after having their first child.” For HCMC, the new slogan “each couple should have two children” should be used to replace the long-standing policy that “every family should have only one or two children,” as stipulated in the 2003 Ordinance on Population, he said. After 10 years of implementing the Ordinance, To Thi Kim Hoa, head of the HCMC Sub-department of Population and Family Planning, said the birth rate in the city has continuously been on the decrease year after year. Therefore, the city authorities should encourage each couple to have two children and advise women in the childbearing age to have babies as soon as they can after getting married, Hoa said. On a nationwide scale, whether or not the population policy should be loosened to encourage people to have two children required comprehensive surveys and studies, Hoa said, adding that this issue should be discussed in the near future when the country reviews the 10-year implementation of the Ordinance.Aging, sex imbalance As a result of the policy that restrains birth rates over the past decades, Vietnam is entering the stage of aging population, which means the proportion of people in the working age is declining while that of old people is increasing, said Prof. Dr Nguyen Dinh Cu, former head of the Institute for Population and Social Issues. According to the Statistics General Department, the proportion of people over 65 years old increased from 4.7 percent in 1979 to 7.1 percent in 2012 and will surge to 10.1 percent in 2029 and to 18 percent in 2049. Currently Vietnam has about 9 million elderly people and it is expected that elderly people will account for 20 percent of the country’s population in 2035-2038. Therefore, proper policies should be devised to ensure the quality of life of the elderly and enable them to make contributions to society, Prof. Cu said. Lowered birth rate also worsens the sex imbalance at birth, the scientist said. “When the birth rate is lower and when the traditional concept of favoring men over women is still prevailing, women are more likely to give birth to boys than to girls, causing the existing sex imbalance to become more serious.” The sex ratio at birth (male to female) in Vietnam in 2009 is 110.6/100. Two years later the ratio increased to 112.2. Such a situation will make 2-4 million men in the marriage age unable to find wives by 2050. Therefore, the country’s population policy should be adjusted to slow down the ageing of the population and ease the sex imbalance at birth, Cu said. China has turned from the traditional “one-child” policy to the new “one-and-a-half child” policy, Trong said. The change was made after demographers forecast that nearly one out of every four people in the country will be older than 65 by the year 2050, he said.
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