Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Monday that low birth rates and an aging population in the archipelago threaten the functioning of Japanese society, Reuters and Agerpres reported.

Addressing children and early childhood education policy is a building block that “cannot wait any longer and must not be delayed”, the Conservative leader said in a general policy speech in Parliament.

“Due to the low birth rate, according to our estimates, the annual number of births last year fell below 800,000,” he added.

For this reason, Japan is “on the verge of being unable to continue functioning as a society,” the prime minister also said.

Kishida said his policies, which include the launch of a new “Agency for Children and Families” in April, are aimed at ensuring the “viability” and “inclusion” of the world’s third-largest economy.

The Japanese prime minister added that he wants to increase spending on children’s programs in the long term.

“We have to build a social economy that puts children first,” he said.

Japan’s new government is taking new measures to combat the demographic crisis

Many industrialized countries are experiencing declining birth rates, but the trend is most pronounced in Japan, which is experiencing a demographic decline and has the second-highest percentage of residents aged 65 and over in the world after Monaco, according to the World Bank.

Japan, with a population of 125 million people, spends a large part of its resources on the needs of its growing elderly population.

Birth rates are falling, including in Japan’s neighboring countries, including China, where the population will decline in 2022, according to data released last week, for the first time in six decades.

Kishida’s comments on Monday came after his government announced in early January that it would offer 1 million yen ($7,500) per child to families moving from the Tokyo metropolitan area to try to stem population decline in the rest of the country.

The Asian country’s demographic crisis was also commented on last spring by South African billionaire Elon Musk, who sparked anger in Japan after he said the island nation would “cease to exist” due to a declining birth rate.