Vietnam's One-or-Two-Child Policy in Action

VIETNAM FORMALLY INTRODUCED in late 1988 a comprehensive fertility policy encouraging parents to have no more than two children. Billboards that advertise the official family-size goal of or two children (mot hoac hai con) are now ubiquitous in much of the country. Like its more severe onechild counterpart in China, the Vietnamese policy was formulated to stem the current rapid growth in population that, it is feared, may derail national development plans. Such plans are ambitious, yet the mood of cautious optimism for the future may be justified. After almost four decades of continuous social, military, and political upheavals that led the country to the brink of mass starvation in the early 1980s, Vietnam has made a phoenix-like recovery. As in China and the former Soviet Union, Vietnam recently began to institute an official program of agricultural decollectivization and free-market reforms (Doi Moi). Peasants have responded so positively to these reforms that Vietnam is now the third largest exporter of rice next to Thailand and the United States, despite its being one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The US-led economic embargo ended in 1994, and the World Bank and other institutions are now contributing to a variety of development projects. Nevertheless, building an effective infrastructure will require several decades. With annual population growth exceeding 2 percent in a country with over 72 million people and with both unemployment and income disparities growing in the wake of recent reforms, some observers fear that unchecked fertility will contribute to the long-term perpetuation of poverty as well as to environmental degradation (Le and Rambo 1993). To date, there has been no attempt to examine the implementation of the Vietnamese fertility policy nor the popular response to it. The reason for this is simple. Existing data sources have been limited and restrictions on access to rural areas, where about 80 percent of Vietnamese live, have precluded assessment of this policy with the same rigor that has been applied to China's one-child initiative. Assessments of China's policy have addressed the following issues: its historical background (Tien 1991); its