#实话实说#
According to CCTV Finance, South Korea's total imports of chili sauce from China hit a record high, exceeding 100,000 tons last year alone.
Looking at this data alone, I thought it was just a simple price reason, but what people didn't expect was that the reason for a large number of imports was "no one grows chili peppers in South Korea"!
Not only chili peppers, but also food is running out, and the prices of all kinds of agricultural products in South Korea are soaring.
Therefore, a new profession has been born, carrying grain from Chinese "human flesh" to South Korea to sell, and it is said that he can earn 2-30,000 yuan a month.
South Korea's aging population is not a new problem, but it is surprising that it has reached this level.
Anyway, South Korea is also the former "Asian Tigers", why is there no "pepper freedom"?
All this has to start with the "old people".
Elderly people who can't retire
According to Xinhua News Agency, the "Population Situation Outlook 2022-2072" released by Statistics Korea said that South Korea will enter a super-aging society by 2072.
Based on the current birth rate, South Korea's total population may only be 36.2 million in 2072, and nearly half of them will be over 65 years old.
Currently, 1 in 10 households in South Korea is elderly living alone.
We have the impression that people over the age of 65 should square dance, go on a trip, or help with children.
But 50% of the elderly in South Korea are still working. Among them, 25.6% of the elderly are engaged in production work, 22.6% are self-employed, and only about 2% are engaged in clerical work.
The remaining half, it's not that they don't want to work, it's that they probably won't find a job.
The money earned by hard work every month is only enough for the elderly to barely make ends meet.
The average monthly expenditure of elderly families in South Korea is 1.402 million won (about 7,713 yuan), and 60% is spent on food, housing and medical care.
If one day they lose their ability to work, how can they ensure their basic livelihood?
Young people who don't have children
The aging population is so serious, in the final analysis, that South Korea's birth rate is too low.
In general, for a country to maintain population stability, it needs to have 2.1 children per woman.
And what is South Korea? 0.78 – only one-third of the ideal value.
In 2022, there are about 250,000 newborns in South Korea, which is already very small.
But in the first three quarters of 2023, only 177,000 people were born, a record low since 1981.
It is hard to imagine that in a country of 51.74 million people, only more than 200,000 children are born a year.
Why don't they give birth?
According to research by the Institute for Korean Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, there may be three main reasons why Koreans don't have children.
First, raising children is too expensive.
From birth to the age of 18, South Korean parents spend about 250,000 euros on education, while their per capita annual income is only 22,300 euros.
In other words, a person who does not eat or drink and saves 11 years of salary is enough for his children to receive education.
Second, there is no time to raise children.
In 2018, South Korea's National Assembly passed a bill to reduce the maximum working week to 52 hours.
That translates to 40 hours a normal week and 12 hours of overtime on weekends, which sounds like a long time.
But before that, the maximum working week in South Korea was 68 hours, and even if you didn't take a break, you had to work 10 hours a day.
Not to mention raising children, young people may not even have time to have children.
Third, women have their own pursuits.
In South Korea, once a woman becomes pregnant, she is likely to have her career ruined, transferred to another job or even fired.
Parents have spent 10 years of salary training for their daughter, and they have worked hard to get here, but they will lose everything when they have children.
As a result, more and more Korean women are choosing to give up childbearing for their careers.
The whirlpool of a vicious circle
Food prices in South Korea have been soaring in recent years due to labor shortages and rising raw materials.
Converted to RMB, rice is 8.3 yuan per catty, apples are 23 yuan per catty, and bananas are 12 yuan per catty.
The produce itself is so expensive, not to mention the processed food.
What's even more amazing is that the price of local Korean food is more expensive than the price of imported food.
Generally speaking, the price of imported food is added to the customs duties, transportation, and storage costs, and the price should be higher.
In this case, locally produced food in Korea is still much more expensive, and perhaps it is true that no one is engaged in agricultural production.
The rise in food prices has made the already meagre pensions of the elderly even more inadequate.
Older people can only continue to work to supplement their basic living expenses.
The high cost of living also makes young "social animals" afraid to get married and have babies.
Young people can only continue to work and try to maintain their current lives.
I heard that the South Korean government recently introduced a new rule that civil servants cannot be promoted if they do not have children.
Even this method has been used, which shows how desperate the South Korean government is.
There was a joke on the Internet before, saying that the first country in the world to disappear may be South Korea.
Now it seems that if South Korea still cannot get out of this vicious circle, the future is really uncertain.
Write at the end:
Survival and reproduction are the natural attributes of human beings.
If a society has forced people to survive, it has to give up reproduction.