Overcrowded Vietnam Is Said to Face Catastrophe (Published 1994) (2024)

Their streets are blocked by peddlers, beggars and parked motorbikes, their houses are overflowing with young children and visiting relatives, and even after death the urns containing their ashes must compete for space on the crowded shelves of Buddhist pagodas.

Vietnam is bursting at the seams with people, and unless the nation can change its demographic, social and economic trends, the Vietnamese will face a catastrophe, many experts believe.

As the population booms, the Communist Government seems to be floundering in its efforts to balance the demands of a free-market economy against the state supervision and support needed to maintain national social and economic cohesion.

Liberalized Government economic policy has attracted foreign investment and allowed shopkeepers to fill their stores with imported television sets and motorbikes. But predatory packs of thieves roam Ho Chi Minh City -- which is still called Saigon, except in official usage -- unchecked by police forces that are paid so little that the officers must extort bribes to feed their families.

Public health, education, road-building and other nation-building pursuits have been starved of money and official support. The Government has moved at glacial speed to meet a growing need for new laws on taxation, trade, banking, traffic and countless other activities.

Many Vietnamese experts say that a lack of managerial skill is the country's most serious shortcoming and that because of the decline in the country's education system, new managers are scarcer than ever. Because improvement of the education system depends partly on recruiting effective new managers, the country is locked in a vicious cycle, some say.

Since 1975, when the "American War" came to an end, Vietnam's population has increased by more than 60 percent. This impoverished land, which is only about the size of New Mexico, now has more than 72 million people, making it the 12th most populous country on earth. Demographers predict that by 2025 the population will reach 168 million, a staggering number considering the limited space and resources available.

Hanoi has mounted a campaign to reduce the birth rate, and most state and recently privatized businesses now threaten to fire any worker who has more than two children. Billboards that graphically depict the use of condoms, intrauterine devices and vasectomies adorn intersections in cities and towns.

But in a country where two-thirds of the population is still agricultural, such advertising has limited effect. "We city dwellers don't need to be told to have only two children," a shopkeeper said. "Most of us already use birth control."

Throughout Asia, farmers traditionally have large families to share the labor of growing and harvesting rice, and to make up for high infant mortality and short life expectancy. Vietnamese farmers, by all accounts, have largely ignored the official injunction against large families.

And many farmers have recently taken to moonlighting in the towns and cities to earn money for Japanese motorbikes and electronic gadgets. Between crops, many farmers migrate to towns to take temporary jobs as bicycle-taxi drivers or manual laborers, further swelling city populations. Teeming City Lacks Many Public Services

The population of Saigon in 1975 was about 2.5 million, but today this largest city in Vietnam has 4.5 million permanent residents and another half million temporary residents, most of them migrant farmers.

During nearly two decades of privation under Communism, many Vietnamese accumulated savings they are now spending on imported motorbikes, televisions, video recorders, boom boxes, refrigerators and other luxuries from the industrial world. Few buy automobiles, for which the import duty is 170 percent, but most Vietnamese families own at least one motorbike, costing around $2,100.

Although Vietnam's people have begun to acquire some of the products associated with prosperity, the Government remains too poor to sustain public services.

Despite the policy of doi moi -- renewal -- introduced in 1986 and the rapid recent transition from state socialism to a chaotic market economy, the Hanoi Government has yet to learn how to collect the taxes it needs to pay for roads, railways, clean water, health care, industrial research and an honest police force.

Officials acknowledge that Government salaries are so low (a police officer is paid about $16 a month and a teacher makes about $25) that graft and corruption are far more widespread than they were under the notoriously corrupt Saigon Government up to 1975. Medical Care And Schools Scarce

Medical care in many parts of the country is virtually nonexistent, even though some 300 doctors are currently unemployed.

Dr. Do Hong Ngoc, director of health information and education for Ho Chi Minh City, said about 300 doctors graduate from medical schools in southern Vietnam each year, but to work they must spend their first three years as Government employees, paid $25 a month. If a young doctor can survive for three years on such a salary, he or she is then permitted to go into private practice and make a decent living.

"Starting doctors can make much more money as traders and business people, so many of them abandon their medical careers," Dr. Ngoc said. "Young people look upon our generation of doctors and scientists as poor people, not to be emulated."

The same problems plague public education.

The Vietnam News Service, a Government agency, recently reported that in the mountainous central province of Gia Lai, 203 hamlets are without schools. Nationwide, a report by the Ministry of Education and Training estimated that about two million Vietnamese between the ages of 15 and 35 were unable to read or write, a marked decline in the literacy rate from what it was in 1975.

American visitors who knew Vietnam before the Communist victory in 1975 are startled these days to see the shoulders of most of the roads in southern Vietnam covered by golden kernels of rice drying in the sun. The new drying system is a symbol of both the promise and the potential catastrophe facing the desperately overcrowded country. Rice Crop Booming; So Are Traffic Jams

The Communist Government abandoned collectivized farming in 1988;, since then, land has been distributed by the state to small farmers under 20-year renewable leases. Rice production has boomed as a result, and once again Vietnam is a major exporter of rice, which helps to pay for the economic recovery.

But there is a debit side to this boom.

Before the 1975 "liberation," most privately owned farms were relatively large, but today the average farmer owns only a backyard garden or at most a few acres -- too little to waste on sun-drying rice. The rice, nevertheless, must be dried, so farmers have taken to spreading out their grain along asphalt-paved road shoulders. Foreign importers of Vietnamese rice increasingly complain that it contains bits of asphalt, debris from the wheels of trucks and motorbikes, and the droppings of birds, dogs and farm animals.

The population boom and the consequent crowding and elbowing touches every facet of life.

Townspeople laugh ruefully at their monumental motorbike traffic jams, among the worst in the world. But the casualty rate is no laughing matter.

During the first three months of this year there were 396 serious accidents in Saigon alone, causing 133 deaths, injury to 434 people and heavy damage to 498 vehicles. Stoplights are few and far between, and even when they work, many people simply ignore them. The hardy pedestrian bent on crossing a street customarily half closes his eyes, smiles benignly and walks into the thick of the beeping, yelling, roaring maelstrom.

The pedestrian usually survives, but drivers sometimes come to grief. There is no law requiring motorbike users or bicyclists to wear helmets, and no seat-belt law for car drivers. Owners of most motorbikes, those with engines rated at 50 cubic centimeters or less, do not need drivers' licenses, and many bikers are downright reckless.

The police often stop them -- they stop even the most law-abiding drivers several times a week -- but for a bribe of a dollar or two, a driver is sped on his or her way without undue inconvenience. Gap Between Rich And Poor Widening

The Government has given top priority to stimulating development by creating a market economy and by attracting extensive foreign investment and technical help. But this has created huge problems that are worsened by the population explosion.

One problem cited by Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai is the widening gap between rich and poor, a direct affront to the ideals of socialism.

There are painfully apparent differences between the standards of living of relatively wealthy entrepreneurs and the street people who sell lottery tickets, postcards and stolen watches.

Huge families that live in the tropical squalor of crumbling brick-and-stucco buildings have almost nothing in common with the brokers and business people who are making fortunes by arranging deals between newly privatized Vietnamese enterprises and foreign companies.

There is also a large and potentially dangerous economic gulf between northern and southern Vietnam, which in many ways remain separate countries despite the postwar unification. Foreign investors still feel more comfortable dealing with enterprises in the former South Vietnam than they do in the north, a fact reflected by the substantially larger investments being made in and around Saigon.

Many Saigonese believe that within sharply defined limits, Hanoi has decided to leave southern Vietnam to its own devices, provided that the southern part of the country continues to bring in the trade and investment essential to national development. Many Vietnamese say they feel more free in the south than in the north. Foreign Criticism Not Appreciated

But despite its zeal to join the developed, industrialized world, Vietnam is unwilling to accommodate pleas from the United States and other Western countries for greater toleration of Government critics.

"Human rights involve national perspective," Mr. Mai said in an interview. "The United States may be troubled, for example, by China's insistence on limiting families to two children. For their part, the Chinese may regard widespread gun ownership in the United States as a threat to human rights.

"As for Vietnam, we fully support human rights, but we oppose initiatives by outside nations to interfere in our internal affairs."

In fact, many foreign businessmen argue that Vietnam needs tougher legal and economic restraints, and that liberalization of human rights policies is not one of the country's immediate priorities.

"This country is out of control and just growing like Topsy," said an American trader, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. "There's no comprehensive system of law covering investment, taxes, mortgages, bankruptcy, insurance or the other cornerstones of a free-market economy. Most of all, this country needs law. And it needs to create the means of enforcing laws."

The fines imposed for civil infractions are tiny. The B.G.I. Tien Giang Company, a French-Vietnamese joint venture that makes beverages, was recently convicted of adulterating one of its products with saccharine -- a sweetener that is illegal in Vietnam. The company was fined the equivalent of about $100, a penalty several American businessmen called woefully inadequate.

"You can get away with almost anything in Vietnam if you have a few dollars to pay a tiny fine or pay someone off," an American said. "That's got to stop if this country wants to make real progress."

Most of all, Vietnamese leaders agree, there are too many Vietnamese, and a brake must be applied to the birth rate, which threatens to double the population in 28 years.

"We'll never apply the draconian measures used in China to curb population growth," said Nguyen Xuan Oanh, an economist and investment consultant. "But we've got to do something before it's too late."