CHINA: Chinese population officials are planning to expand a "Care for Girls" programme, which encourages people in the countryside to have more girls to combat the worsening gender imbalance.
As it stands, there are 119 boys born for every 100 girls in China, much higher than the global ratio of 105 to 100. The repercussion of this is that in 10 years, there could be 25 million bachelors roaming the country with no hope of finding a mate.
Sons are traditionally preferred and, as most couples can have only one child, prospective parents have been known to abort a pregnancy if tests showed the foetus was female.
In rural China there is a saying that "raising a daughter is like watering someone else's fields", a sign of how deep-rooted the pro-boy bias is in the countryside. Families need to find a dowry for a girl when the time comes for her to get married into someone else's family. Also farming families want boys to work the fields. While the single child policy of population control is strictly enforced in many parts of the country, in rural China couples are allowed to have a second child if the first one is a girl.
The "Care for Girls" programme was launched by the State Population and Family Planning Commission in 2003 in 24 pilot counties. It provides social benefits, including cash payments, to families with only girls, in order to boost the status of girls and women.
A family with one or two girls gets about €3,000 in subsidies before the girls are married, including education benefits and tax exemptions.
The programme also addresses more traditional prejudices, such as the belief that only male children can provide for elderly parents in old age. Under the scheme, the parents are paid out of an endowment insurance scheme from the age of 60.
The commission says the programme has succeeded in reducing the boys-to-girls ratio in those counties from 134/100 to 120/100 during the three years. The programme will be promoted across the country this year.
Last week the health ministry warned against the use of ultrasonic and chromosomal examinations in sex selection abortion. China has prosecuted 3,000 cases of foetus gender identification and selective abortion for non-medical purposes over the past two years.
However, even though gender scanning of the foetus is illegal, the regulation does not spell out punishments and a large black market flourishes, with a scan typically priced at €5 if the child is a boy and €3 if it is a girl.
The government will start closer monitoring of gender ratios among newborn babies and the efficiency of measures against the sex imbalance later this year, said Zhao Baige, a vice-minister in the population and family planning ministry.
More than 60 expert teams had already started evaluations of gender ratios and trends.