Nguyen Thi Hue, the president of the Ho Chi Minh City chapter of the Vietnamese Red Cross (VNRC), believes smokers should set an example – by not smoking outside in public.
In effect, it’s the opposite principle to the one that applies in the West, where the “smokers’ huddle” outside big-city office buildings has become a much-discussed social phenomenon.
But Red Cross volunteers quietly get the “do it in private” message across to prosperous Vietnamese smokers whenever they can.
Madame Hue (as she’s universally known) says that ideally nobody should smoke at all. But when it comes to cigarettes in Asia, and especially in a country where some hotels thoughtfully leave new packs in the rooms of arriving guests and nice clean ashtrays are a ubiquity in bars and restaurants, someone has to start somewhere.
While the Red Cross Red Crescent worldwide spends a great deal of effort battling stigma, the HCMC Red Cross under Madame Hue is, quite bravely, trying to introduce a little.
It’s one example of the VNRC having to broaden its horizons to take up new challenges, she told the International Federation in an interview at the chapter headquarters.
Garbage, and the ever-growing problem of waste disposal amidst economic growth often described as “breakneck”, is another.
“Our volunteers have been going into communities and trying to persuade people to dispose of their garbage sensibly, rather than just throwing into the streets,” says Madame Hue.
Newspapers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest and its economic hub, have reported that canals are being used as dustbins in some parts of the city; the refuse build-up is so thick in places people walk across it to get from one side to the other.
“Step by step economic growth is changing the workload we face,” Madame Hue adds.
Environmental price
The statistics are dizzying: Vietnam has one of the best-performing economies in the developing world, according to the World Bank, with average growth of 7.3 per cent since 2001. Foreign investment, the bank adds, is “surging”. Fully thirty million people have been lifted out of poverty in a decade.
One international accounting company has just reported that Vietnam ranks first in the world at 14 per cent for private-sector employment growth, compared to China and India at 12 per cent and the UK and the US at 2 per cent.
But there is, of course, an environmental price to be paid for this, as the government and the National Society leadership in the capital, Hanoi, are well aware.
A seminar in HCMC earlier this month, timed to coincide with World Environment Day on 5 June, heard that Vietnam faces “eight major environmental issues”: climate change, a shortage of surface fresh water, exhausted underground water, a reducing supply of arable land, food insecurity, deforestation, pollution and population pressure.
Directly or indirectly, they all impact on Red Cross work.
Vo Quy, a scientist from the Environment Research Centre at Hanoi’s National University, told the seminar that Vietnam lost 400,000 hectares of agricultural land in the past ten years, according to a report in The Saigon Times Daily. Lost, that is, to industry, roads, housing and (the newspaper added pointedly) “golf courses”.
“I think we should do something to solve these urgent matters as soon as possible for the benefit of the next generations,” Quy said.
There are opportunities too. “The HCMC chapter is fast becoming the National Society’s champion fund-raiser,” says Irja Sandberg, the International Federation’s head of delegation in Hanoi, “as well they might, with this rapidly expanding private sector on their doorstep.”
Mangrove, pine trees, bamboo
But as in so many other parts of the world where storms cause death and damage on a seasonal basis, the Red Cross probably worries most about climate change and the more intense typhoons it might bring.
Unlike the coastal provinces of central Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, is not in the typhoon firing-line. So far.
But Madame Hue’s deputy, Le Quang Ninh, who also directs the HCMC Charity Fund, points out that typhoon damage is the most important reason why rural people migrate to the city.
“Now thirty per cent of the city’s population came from outside,” he says. “The next most important factor is unemployment and a shortage of land to farm.” (In the first half of this decade, an estimated 200,000 people a year came to HCMC, giving it a total population now of around 7 million.)
Vietnam is also home to one of the best-known disaster risk-reduction projects in the world, aimed at limiting the destruction caused by typhoons making landfall: the coastal mangrove plantations.
The Vietnam Red Cross, with International Federation assistance, has been planting several different species of mangrove, and now in some places pine trees and bamboo, in eight provinces on the east coast since the mid-1990s. The aim is to break the force of the waves in a storm and provide some protection against sea-surges like the one that devastated Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta last month.
They bring economic benefits too, attracting sea life that can be harvested and sold, like shrimp and crabs.
But thick vegetation along some of the coast is becoming the norm, Sandberg says. “Younger people especially can forget where it comes from.
“The Red Cross effort to generate a sense of ownership of the plantations amongst the young – call it an ‘environmentalist’ message if you like – is a really important part of our work here.
“Not to mention Vietnam’s extraordinary biodiversity as a whole.”
Test bed
In a very real sense, Vietnam has proved to be a test bed for new ideas in the Red Cross Red Crescent world. And that open mind about what disaster preparedness (DP) should look like will be a life-saver in the future, argues Sandberg.
“The climate-change debate has caused fears that typhoon tracks will become more and more unpredictable and reach further south,” she says. “Last year Typhoon Lekima severely affected six central provinces that were already flooded by heavy rainfall, but caused few casualties.
“Huge numbers of people were moved in time, some by the Red Cross, or we might have had headlines saying ‘hundreds dead’. But climate change has increased the urgency of clarifying the Red Cross role in the national disaster-preparedness plan.”
Sandberg explains that, Vietnam being Vietnam, evacuation is less of an issue than in many countries. “The fishing fleet,” she points out, “can be virtually ordered back to port, for example, when the storm warnings come.”
One small climate alarm-bell rang recently in Ho Chi Minh City when its Steering Committee for Storm and Flood Control reported that landslides triggered by the rainy season had become “a continual occurrence” and were, unusually, expected to go on until the end of August.
“In the south especially, Red Cross DP will have to be carefully thought through,” says Sandberg.
“But the cooperation on the Mekong River delta among the National Societies of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam is an important example of a joint Red Cross effort making a difference and strengthening preparedness.”
Additional reporting from Hanoi by Van Nguyen of the International Federation.
|
 |
 |
|
|
Nguyen Thi Hue, president of the Ho Chi Minh City chapter of the Vietnamese Red Cross: “Step by step economic growth is changing the workload we face.” (p17811)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Nguyen Manh Khuong, a Vietnamese Red Cross volunteer tends mangrove plantation in Haiphong province's Trang Cat commune. (p17811)
|
|
|
 |
|
|
People being evacuated from a flooded area in Vietnam's central Thua Thien Hue province in October 2007. (REUTERS/Nguyen Huy Kham/courtesy www.alertnet.org)
|
|
|
 |
|
|
A ride-on rice harvester makes short work of a paddy field near Tan Phu Xuan commune in Dong Thap province. Vietnam suffers a reducing supply of arable land because of economic development. (p17807)
|
|
News
