VietNamNet Bridge – National Assembly Standing Committee members yesterday, Oct 2, raised objections to a Government's proposal to establish a fund for preventing the harmful effects of tobacco use.

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Xuyen told the lawmakers that the fund would be a stable financial source to improve community health, since smoking caused enormous social and environmental damage and State budget resources could not cover all of the costs of treating the diseases and repairing the damage caused by smoking.

Each year, 40,000 people in Viet Nam died of tobacco-related illness, and the figure was predicted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to rise to 70,000 by the year 2030, Xuyen said.

"In 2010, Viet Nam spent VND2.3 trillion (US$109.5 million) to treat just three of the 25 diseases related to smoking, including lung cancer," she said.

A smoker also spends about a third of the amount spent on food in a month, and five times as much as per-capita for healthcare, so smoking could also be viewed as an indirect cause of higher rates of hunger and poverty, Xuyen added, noting that tobacco use also had negative impacts on the environment.

She agreed with lawmakers, however, that the State budget should not be the only source of funding for tobacco prevention programmes, urging that smokers be required to contribute to the fund in order to develop an increased awareness of their social responsibility. However, the contribution should not be viewed as a tax or fee, she said.

The chairwoman of the National Assembly Committee on Social Issues, Truong Thi Mai, backed the proposal, saying the committee was aware of the necessity to increase funding for educational campaigns and dissemination programmes to raise people's awareness, estimating the need at VND10 billion ($476,000) per year.

However, National Assembly Finance and Budget Committee chairman Phung Quoc Hien disagreed, saying that tobacco was already subject to special consumption taxes aimed at limiting goods of which the State wanted to discourage production and importation.

Contributions by smokers to a tobacco prevention fund would be an additional kind of special consumption tax in addition to those already included in the price of cigarettes, he said.

"We don't need to set up the fund," Hien said. "If necessary, we can raise the special consumption tax."

National Assembly Chairman Nguyen Sinh Hung called the fund idea infeasible and said it would be very complicated to operate the fund.

National Assembly vice chairwoman Tong Thi Phong asked the Government to more carefully assess the proposal to establish the fund.

"An increase in the special consumption tax would be more efficient, more transparent and easier to control," Phong said.

Phan Xuan Dung, chairman of the National Assembly Committee for Science, Technology and Environment, said other measures could be considered, including high levels of fines on smoking in non-smoking areas and other violations, although the persons in charge of managing these areas should also be subject to fines.

Deputies therefore asked the Government to reconsider the proposed provisions in the draft law, including a proposed ban on the sale of cigarettes to persons under 18 years of age.

National Assembly Standing Committee members yesterday also heard Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan present the draft Law on Universities, which would be the first legislation specifically regulating higher education in universities. The law would amend or replace some provisions in the Law on Higher Education, he said.

The chairman of the Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children, Dao Trong Thi, asked the law's drafting committee to set out standards for ranking and classifying universities.

Mai agreed, saying the law needed to establish minimum requirements for accrediting universities, including requirements for facilities and faculty qualifications so that the society could feel secure about their quality.

Only 14 per cent of university faculty members currently had PhD degrees and only 35 per cent had Master's degrees, so it was an worrying problem, she said.

Thi said the verification of educational quality was also a must for universities, asking the drafting committee to set procedures that could be used as a basis for university evaluation and classification. Independent evaluation agencies also needed to be constituted and authorised, he said.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News