Demographic winter? Korea is not alone

By Richard Pennington

Hardly a day goes by without my opening The Korea Times or one of Seoul's other newspapers and finding a story or two about this country's most distressing problem―our low birth rate and its long-term demographic implications.

As much as I value old folks, the truth is that we need more babies! I live and work near Gangnam Station, and kids are so few here that when one of them walks down the street, I practically stop and stare. If children are our future, what kind of future are we going to have in light of this dearth of youngsters?

The statistics are, or should be, familiar to all of us. The fertility rate is now 0.92 children per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Almost 52 million people live in Korea, a number that is expected to peak in four years and then begin to decline. There were about 303,000 births in 2019, a more than 50 percent drop from 2000. The number of marriages last year also fell to a new low―239,200. These figures bode ill for Korea.

A summary of how we got here is as follows. Almost as soon as he seized power in 1961, Park Chung-hee began emphasizing a reduction in the birth rate (more than six per woman at the time). Parents were encouraged to have just two children, or better yet one. A high birth rate equated with poverty, and escaping personal and national poverty was a widely agreed-upon goal.

Park's policy had dramatic results, as the birth rate fell to 3.5 in 1975, to 1.59 in 1990, to 1.08 in 2005 and to the aforementioned 0.92 today. It is ironic that this steep reduction in the number of births aided the country's economic development and yet is the cause of our rather daunting future prospects.

A number of pronatalist initiatives (such as subsidized childcare leave, free nurseries, government-trained baby sitters and cash stipends) have been tried over the last 20 years in an effort to bring more Korean kiddos into the world, but they have proven as futile as they were expensive.

Misery loves company, and we have lots of company. Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Moldova, China, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, Ukraine and other countries are dealing with much the same problem. One of those surely caught your attention: China, long the most populous nation on earth. Indeed, China's one-child policy implemented in 1979 has proven a bit too successful.

If even China is gradually running out of people, this must be a global problem. (The world's population is expected to top out at 9.7 billion in the 2060s and fall to 8.8 billion at the end of this century.) Demographers, social scientists and people at the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs are struggling to come to grips with the decline in the number of babies being born and its ramifications.

“Most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline,” said Dr. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “Jaw-dropping” is the term he uses to describe how at least 23 countries―South Korea among them―are expected to see their population more than halve by 2100.

Nations that resist the idea of massive immigration will come to realize they have no choice. Minds and borders will be opened gradually. Migratory outflows and inflows will happen on a scale we could not conceive of before.

A couple of countries in our “neighborhood” might seem to be good candidates for sending much-needed workers―Vietnam and the Philippines. They have high birth rates, right? Yes, but not like in earlier times. The former is now 2.04, and the latter 2.55.

The time fast approaches when countries will actually compete for immigrants. There is and will continue to be one region that has a surplus, and I refer to sub-Saharan Africa. If we do not know about Angola, Niger, Mali, Uganda, Zambia, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Somalia, Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Tanzania, Cameroon, Guinea, Benin and others, perhaps we should.

Although in most cases African birth rates are declining, it's only slightly and they are so far above our numbers that the solution is clear enough. Two-thirds of the world's population growth in the next 30 years will derive from countries south of the Sahara Desert.

The bleak scenario for my adopted homeland might be affected by one other eventuality―that is, the reunification of North and South Korea. The DPRK's birth rate has also plummeted, but just to 1.90, still double that of here. They have more babies, children and teenagers than we do. Not only that, they're Korean. At any rate, societal reorganization here and around the world in the coming decades is a virtual certainty.

Richard Pennington (raput76@gmail.com), a native of Texas in the U.S., works as an editor at a law firm in southern Seoul. He has written 22 nonfiction books, including "Travels of an American-Korean, 2008-2013." He is the director of an NGO, the Committee to Bring Jikji Back to Korea.