Ministry of Health launches National Action Month on Population

On the afternoon of December 9, the Ministry of Health held the launching ceremony of the National Action Month on Population 2014 in Hanoi with the theme "Maintaining a reasonably low birth rate for the country's sustainable development."

Delegates participate in a parade to promote the Communication Campaign on Gender Imbalance at Birth. Photo: VNA

Speaking at the launching ceremony, Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Viet Tien said that Vietnam's population and family planning work in recent years has achieved many important results.

The average number of children per couple of childbearing age decreased from 6.4 in 1960 to 2.1 in 2013; the average annual population growth rate decreased from 3.5% in 1960 to 1.05% in 2013; the population size in 2013 reached only 90 million people; the average life expectancy increased from 40 years old in 1960 to 73 years old in 2013.

Despite important achievements, Deputy Minister Nguyen Viet Tien assessed that population and family planning work is still facing many difficulties and challenges in terms of population size, population structure, and population quality, directly affecting the country's sustainable development.

In particular, the population size is large and continues to increase, the birth rate is still unpredictable, in many provinces the birth rate is still high and has not reached the replacement level, but in some provinces and cities the birth rate is too low, causing disadvantages for socio-economic development.

According to statistics from the General Department of Population and Family Planning (Ministry of Health), currently, many localities in the Northern, Central and Central Highlands mountainous areas still have the phenomenon of triplets, even 6-7 children. On the contrary, the Southeast and Mekong Delta regions have a very low birth rate of 1.5-1.6 children.

Therefore, the important task in population work in the coming period is to maintain a reasonable replacement fertility level. In the current period, the population message is no longer "Each couple should have 1 or 2 children" but has changed to "Each couple should have 2 children."

In addition, a major problem in population work is the increasing imbalance of gender at birth, higher each year than the previous year. Currently, the ratio is 113.8 boys per 100 girls.

According to the assessment of the General Department of Population and Family Planning, if there is no real breakthrough in implementation solutions, Vietnam will find it difficult to achieve the goal of maintaining the sex ratio at birth in 2020 at 115 boys per 100 girls.

“If we want to maintain the results achieved over the past decades, we cannot relax population work. Everyone must participate. This is not a matter of sophisticated techniques or extremely high technology to do population work, but an extremely important ideological issue,” said Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Viet Tien.

To address this situation, a representative of the Ministry of Health said that the population sector is currently focusing on strengthening communication and education, mobilizing people to change their awareness and behavior regarding gender selection at birth. In addition, the population sector is having policies that prioritize women, families with only daughters, and strengthening law enforcement on prohibiting gender selection at birth.

According to Vietnam+