ANDONG, South Korea (AFP) — South Korea's worst wildfires have laid bare the country's demographic crisis and regional disparities: it is a super-aged society with the world's lowest birth rate, and rural areas are both underpopulated and disproportionately elderly.

Most of the victims of the fire, which hit deeply rural Andong and Uiseong hardest, were "in their 60s and 70s", an official from the Korea Forest Service told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

In farmer Kim's district, 62 percent of residents are 60 or older. Her neighbour, 79-year-old Lee Sung-gu, who is also an apple farmer, said he felt powerless to act as his village went up in flames.

"I didn't have the strength to put the fire out. I didn't have the courage to do it, I could only just watch," Lee said.

For many elderly residents who have watched their houses go up in flames, it is hard to see how they can recover at their age.

"Right now, it's devastating, heartbreaking, and horrific," villager Kim Seung-weon, 73, told AFP inside his severely burned house, a melted air conditioner and charred sofa behind him.

Vast numbers of people moved from the countryside to growing cities in search of employment and prosperity as the South industrialized in the decades after the Korean War and rose to become a global technology and cultural powerhouse.

The trend continues — the number of people in farming families fell from 4.4 million to over 2 million between 1998 and 2023, figures from Statistics Korea show.

While farmers only account for four percent of the entire South Korean population, 52.6 percent of them are aged 65 or older, according to government data.

No safety net

Jeon Young-soo, a professor at Hanyang University's Graduate School of International Studies, said the wildfires revealed "the severity of the issues surrounding an ultra-ageing society and regional disparities" in South Korea.

"Due to the lack of a younger population in rural areas, the absence of a safety net for disasters and infrastructure has become very much evident," he told AFP.

Some locals have complained that villages were left to fend for themselves.

The governor of Yeongyang, where 55 percent of its 15,271 residents are aged 60 or older, issued a statement on Friday urging the town's citizens to help by clearing embers and looking after their neighbors.

Six of the 28 fatalities from the wildfires were from Yeongyang.