The World Today for August 01, 2024

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Baby Onboarding

ASIA

In Japan, a diapers company recently announced that it would be switching its focus from babies to adults – it’s been years since the sales of its products for seniors vastly outpaced those for infants.

Across East Asia and elsewhere on the continent, governments, businesses and analysts are reacting – and sometimes panicking – in relation to a steep population decline and an aging population that mean slower economic growth, a strain on services and benefits, and a shrinking labor force to pay for them in the future.

And almost everyone is trying to find a way to solve the dilemma of the missing babies.

This demographic cliff has mainly arisen because of brutal job markets, skyrocketing living and education costs, slow wage growth, employment insecurity, and tough corporate cultures. But many also attribute the decline to, ironically, traditional family values that have kept many Japanese and Korean women from wanting to bear children.

Last year, the birth rate in Japan decreased to a record low after falling more than 5 percent compared with 2022. The approximately 760,000 babies born in 2023 were among the smallest generation born since the country began tallying the birth rate in 1899. The number of live births, meanwhile, has dropped more than 50 percent in five decades, the BBC reported.

At the same time, marriages in Japan decreased by almost 6 percent. Fewer than half a million Japanese couples took vows of matrimony, the lowest rate in 90 years. Out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood, furthermore, are rare in Japan due to “family values based on a paternalistic tradition,” reported the Guardian.

It’s become such a concern that recently, Tokyo officials began developing a dating app to encourage love and, hopefully, marriage and children. That’s in addition to its singles events, counseling sessions on marriage and a campaign where “lovers can have their stories of how they first met turned into comics or songs.”

“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Similar sentiments are expressed in the back halls of the National Assembly in Seoul. Even so, women in South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world, cite cultural hurdles, particularly for women balancing career and work demands with caring for a family, in opting out of motherhood. In the South Korean language, the term for wife is “home person.”

Accordingly, South Korean wives who work grueling day jobs are also expected to cook, clean, and care for the kids, even at an advanced age, wrote the Washington Post. The gender pay gap in the country is also the highest among industrialized countries: Females earn 69 cents on the dollar compared with males.

As a result, many women are opting out, noted World Politics Review. For example, the number of marriages dropped by half between 1996 and 2021.

A movement, 4B, encapsulates this situation: It’s one in which its exclusively female members eschew marriage, childbirth and even dating, saying a life without a man is a life with freedom. “I’m not even fighting the patriarchy – I’ve decided to walk out of it,” said one member, Kim Jina.

Some companies, however, are now jumping in to address these issues, after government initiatives such as subsidized housing for newlyweds and payments for babies failed to reverse the trends. That’s no surprise: Businesses worry over the numbers that show the workforce will halve within 50 years. Now, many are offering bonuses for babies: Booyoung Group, a Seoul-based construction company, for example, is paying new mothers and fathers $75,000 per child.

Japan and South Korea, however, aren’t alone in their population woes: Throughout Asia, countries including China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, and parts of India are experiencing demographic crises. Work demands and traditions are often to blame there, too.

A big challenge in this shift is how governments will pay for the services associated with growing elderly populations – pensions, healthcare, home health aides, etc. – when the pool of younger taxpayers who are working to foot the bill is shrinking. That’s especially a concern in countries like Japan which have long resisted immigration but is now rethinking its policies and rolling out its “tatami welcome mat,” as the Spectator put it.

It’s an even bigger issue for those countries who are aging without having become wealthy such as Thailand and Vietnam, which face an aging population that is getting old in poverty, putting a burden on the already patchy provision of pensions, healthcare and other key systems. Meanwhile, these countries’ economies often depend on sectors such as agriculture that aren’t easy for the elderly to participate in.

Meanwhile, China’s birth rate is especially concerning. With 1.4 billion people, the country is now the second-most populous after India, losing its top spot last year. But its population could decrease by half to 770 million by 2100 if current trends continue, argued Scientific American. That threatens its prosperity.

Still, Chinese couples eschew children for the same reasons as others in Asia. Their country’s one-child policy, which sought to restrict out-of-control population growth between 1980 and 2016, was rooted in these economic motivations. “The policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money,” wrote the Wall Street Journal.

Still, the government is taking action, recently raising the retirement age to 65 and putting restrictions on abortions. And Chinese prosecutors, for example, recently exposed Chinese firms that were requiring job applicants to take pregnancy tests so they would not hire workers who would later require parental leave and other benefits, CNN reported.

It’s clear: Officials in Beijing want more kids. But as in South Korea, a preference for males through sex-selection family planning as well as natural trends now means men outnumber women and would-be grooms face bleak marriage prospects, the Conversation wrote. That’s in addition to a trend showing how almost double the number of men over women desire marriage.

Meanwhile, the efforts to change marriage and birth trends as well as initiatives to promote women’s rights and equality are inspiring a backlash from men, some of whom are forming groups similar to incels (shortened from “involuntary celibates”), the Economist wrote.

In South Korea, New Men on Solidarity, a men’s-rights group, calls feminism a mental illness, and is courted by the country’s president who said it is hurting “healthy relationships.” In Japan, “Twitter Feminists,” has become a derogatory term. And a group called “the Center for Weak Men” is attracting strong interest. Meanwhile, only 37 percent of South Korean women say they would date a “patriarchal” man, a recent survey found.

That, the news magazine added, means “the rise in anti-feminist sentiment bodes badly for the region’s birth rates.”

THE WORLD, BRIEFLY

Oil on Fire

IRAN/ ISRAEL/ GAZA STRIP

Hamas said its leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed early Wednesday in an airstrike in Tehran that it blamed on Israel, dealing a major blow to the Palestinian militant group and fanning worries over further escalation in the Middle East, CNN reported.

Haniyeh was Hamas’ most public figure and a key participant in negotiations for a ceasefire agreement between the Israeli government and the group ruling the Gaza Strip. Officials within the Islamist organization said their chief’s assassination was a “grave escalation.”

The strike occurred at 2 a.m. local time, local media reported. Haniyeh was in the Iranian capital to attend the inauguration of the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

“You killed our dear guest in our house and now have paved the way for your harsh punishment,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Israel refused to confirm whether its armed forces had killed Haniyeh.

The late leader had reached Hamas’ top political position in 2017 and had lived in exile in Qatar since 2019. Born in a refugee camp in Gaza City, his activism dates back to the First Intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s.

Haniyeh’s background made him “very popular” in Gaza, said Hani Mahmoud from Al Jazeera.

The impact of Haniyeh’s death is hard to gauge, but observers said it lowers the probability of a truce deal ever seeing the light of day. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” asked Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, who is mediating the talks.

The killing also heightened the worries of families of Israeli hostages, captured by Hamas during the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel that killed nearly 1,200 people and launched the ongoing war, now in its tenth month.

“Haniyeh could have been killed 15 years ago, and they didn’t do it. Why now that there is a deal on the table, did they choose to kill him?” a relative of one of the hostages told Israel’s Haaretz.

The Hamas leader’s killing came after Israel launched a strike in Beirut, Lebanon on Tuesday, killing a top commander of the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.

The Israeli army said the strike was in retaliation to an attack that killed 12 children in the disputed Golan Heights, which Israel and the US blamed on Hezbollah, Axios reported.

The strikes marked the end of two key leaders of Tehran’s proxy militant groups in the region, the Washington Post said. Reports in Arabic media said that a third, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is an ally of Hamas and was involved in the Oct. 7 attacks, was in the building where Haniyeh was killed.

Israel struck Lebanon and Iran in order “to set the region on fire,” senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said Wednesday in Tehran, adding that Hamas and its allies do not want a “regional war.” But Haniyeh’s killing, he added, “sent a clear message: that our only option with this enemy is blood and resistance.”

The killings also led to worries across the world that the region is coming ever closer to an expanding conflict, with analysts saying that they believe Iran will be compelled to respond to an attack in the heart of its capital. Iran and Israel exchanged missile and rocket attacks in a confrontation two months ago.

Long Memories

PERU

Peru’s prosecutor’s office dismissed a genocide case against President Dina Boluarte while filing a complaint against her and other officials for the killing of anti-government protesters, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The case centers on an incident that follows Boluarte’s accession to the nation’s top job in December 2022, which was marked by mass demonstrations across the country, sparked by the premature resignation of President Pedro Castillo. A government crackdown on the protests killed more than 40 people and left dozens of others injured – the worst death toll in Peru’s democratic history.

The office opened the genocide inquiry in January 2023, after weeks of violent scenes in the streets of Lima and other major cities including Juliaca. There, helicopters were filmed dropping tear gas canisters, while on the ground police often shot demonstrators in the head, body, or back, Le Monde reported at the time.

The president’s attorney, Joseph Campos, welcomed the prosecution’s decision to shelve the genocide case, saying there were no elements to justify “such a serious classification,” reported El Peruano.

The protesters’ violent behavior triggered a constitutional duty to control the demonstrations, Campos added.

Meanwhile, the office filed a constitutional complaint against Boluarte for alleged homicide and injuries in the same demonstrations, where it said “grave violations of human rights” occurred, Bloomberg reported.

Peru’s parliament will have to review the complaint because it regards a sitting president. Campos expressed hope that lawmakers will dismiss it, too.

Besides the violence of the 2022-2023 protests, Boluarte’s tenure has been marred by an investigation for illegal enrichment, locally dubbed Rolexgate because it involved her purchasing Rolex watches she seemingly could not have afforded.

Boluarte has denied all wrongdoing.

The president, whom Le Monde described as “out of touch with the people,” has a disapproval rate in voter surveys of nearly 90 percent, TeleSur reported.

Solution, Resolution

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO/ RWANDA

Representatives of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda agreed on a deal Wednesday to pause fighting in the eastern part of the DRC, the Anadolu Agency reported.

The cease-fire will take effect on Aug. 4 at midnight, a statement read, following the expiration of a US-backed humanitarian truce that some of the fighters failed to respect. The agreement also provided for the creation of an “ad hoc reinforced verification mechanism.”

Angola, which announced the deal, had an African Union mandate to secure a political settlement to a conflict that has battered eastern Congo since 2022, and hosted talks between the foreign ministers of both countries – Rwanda’s Olivier Nduhungirehe and the DRC’s Thérèse Kayikwamba.

Wednesday’s breakthrough came days after DRC President Félix Tshisekedi accused his Kenyan counterpart William Ruto of “mismanaging” the Nairobi Process, an initiative launched in 2022 that also aimed at resolving the conflict.

Congolese armed forces have been fighting rebels from the March 23 Movement (M23), predominantly in the North Kivu region. The M23 is mostly composed of Rwandans, but the government in Rwanda’s capital Kigali has repeatedly denied allegations from their Congolese counterparts in Kinshasa that it backed the group. Meanwhile, the Economist reported earlier this week that Rwandan soldiers in Congo likely outnumber the M23 rebels, making the situation more intractable.

Still, whether the fresh agreement will be respected by both sides is still a question. During the ongoing humanitarian truce, at least four young people were killed in a bomb attack in North Kivu.

In addition, the Angolan statement did not specify whether the new deal had a wider scope than the one fostered by the US, Le Monde wrote.

Belgium, once the colonial power ruling the Congo, formerly known as Zaire, welcomed the agreement. It marks “an essential step to ease the suffering of the population and lead to a resolution of the conflict in eastern DRC,” said Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib.

The Congo-M23 conflict is the latest of a series of conflicts in eastern DRC, where approximately six million people have been killed since 1996, Al Jazeera noted.

DISCOVERIES

The Storm Junkies

Most coastal creatures avoid hurricanes, scrambling to take shelter as the monster storm approaches.

The Desertas petrels, a seabird the size of a pigeon, however, chase them across the Atlantic, scientists recently found.

“When we saw the data, we nearly fell off our chairs,” lead study author Francesco Ventura said. “This is the first time we have observed this behavior.”

Until now, the consensus had been that seabirds either avoided hurricanes at all costs or flew into the eye, where the winds are calmer. But Desertas petrels, from the western coast of North Africa, fly right behind the storms, sometimes for days on end and over thousands of miles.

During hurricane seasons in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019, Ventura and his team placed GPS trackers on a few dozen birds to analyze their foraging behavior.

Desertas petrels feed on small fish, squid, and crustaceans, which usually roam in waters between 600 and 3,000 feet deep, too deep for the birds to dive. The researchers found in 2020 that the birds wait until nighttime when their prey moves up to the surface.

Then, last year, Ventura compared his data with hurricane maps. That’s when it clicked.

Associate scientist Caroline Ummenhofer, Ventura’s colleague at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, confirmed that the petrels followed the paths of hurricanes. “When you overlay the petrels’ foraging trips on top of average winds, it’s a very close match,” she said.

The scientists realized that the birds enjoy the benefits of ocean mixing – when strong winds mix warmer surface-level water with cooler water from below. They face waves up to 26 feet tall and wind speeds of 62 mph because they know they will be rewarded with a lot of food.

“It makes sense that some animals, including these petrels, have learned to take advantage of that (ocean) mixing,” Don Lyons, part of the bird conservation group Audubon Seabird Institute, told the Washington Post. “What’s surprising, perhaps, is just how closely they follow the storm.”

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