Baby trafficking becomes lucrative business in Vietnam

Asian Economic News, Jan 31, 2000

BANGKOK, Jan. 28 Kyodo

The trafficking of Vietnamese babies for adoption by foreigners has risen sharply in recent years to become a multimillion dollar business, according to a report submitted to a conference on child trafficking in Southeast Asia that ended Friday.

"With children being sold for up to 5,000 dollars each, child trafficking has become a lucrative business," said the report by the International Organization for Migration, a Geneva-based humanitarian group.

"To keep up with the demand, Vietnamese women are reportedly rushing to produce babies to sell them to foreigners, unlike in the past, when adopted children were mostly abandoned children or those coming from very poor families," it said.

The report noted that authorities in both the northern and southern parts of Vietnam have recently uncovered child-for-sale syndicates. The groups have procured hundreds of babies from poor families for illegal adoption since 1996.

"What happens to these children once they have been smuggled to other countries is not known. Under a worse-case scenario, adoption could also be used as a scheme to procure children for other purposes," it said.

Thousands of Vietnamese babies are adopted abroad every year. Foreigners, mostly from the United States and France, who want to adopt Vietnamese children usually must go through a legal process that takes as long as three months. At least one parent has to travel to Vietnam for a stay ranging from one to four weeks.

Some knowingly or unknowingly engage unauthorized agents linked to corrupt officials who charge large sums to ensure that their applications will be quickly processed.

The French government last April temporarily suspended adoptions of Vietnamese children pending the introduction of watertight vetting procedures.

A U.S. State Department advisory warns prospective parents that some Vietnamese families may be tempted to release their children inappropriately for adoption "either out of greed or with the intent of securing them a better economic future."

Noting that the Vietnamese appear to have "a more elastic definition than do we" of what constitutes an orphaned or abandoned child, it says children are sometimes relinquished to orphanages by two living, healthy parents who claim they are not economically able to care for the child.

"Such assertions cannot be investigated," it says, citing endemic forgery of official documents in Vietnam. The U.S. currently takes in more adopted children from abroad than all other countries combined.

Meanwhile, nine people involved in a ring that trafficked 199 babies abroad from 1995 to 1997 were sentenced earlier this month to prison terms of up to 20 years by a court in the southern province of An Giang. The defendants include a provincial justice department official and the director of an orphan care center.

Unwed mothers and parents from destitute rural families were told by corrupt doctors and nurses that their children would be looked after by the health officials' relatives. The children were then brought to the orphanage to be sold to foreigners, according to local media reports.

Last July, authorities in the northern province of Bac Can uncovered a child-trafficking operation alleged to have sold 77 children to foreigners during the previous 18 months.

Also in July, authorities in the northern province of Ninh Binh filed charges against more than a dozen people, including health and justice department officials, for alleged involvement in a racket involving the sale of some 350 children to foreigners over a three-year period.