ARGENTINA: Hunger Spreads in Land of Abundance

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 26 2002 (IPS) - Although Argentina is the world’s leader in terms of grain production per capita, there is no longer enough food to go around in the midst of the country’s worst crisis ever, and social workers feel helpless when forced to turn people away at the doors to soup kitchens.

“I feel terrible, I feel impotent because the responsibility of saying no falls on me,” Marcelo Cresta, who runs the Casa del Niño, a community centre in the Buenos Aires working-class suburb of Quilmes, told IPS.

Casa del Niño, originally a child care centre, now has a soup kitchen and health centre, as well as a pharmacy, whose shelves, however, are “empty,” said Cresta.

The centre is just one of hundreds of soup kitchens that have emerged all over this Southern Cone country, whose economy collapsed after four years of recession.

In December, looting, rioting and protests brought down two governments in quick succession, and the country defaulted on its foreign debt. Unemployment has climbed to nearly 25 percent, in what was once Latin America’s richest country.

The food shortages were described as “inconceivable” by Fernando Vilela, the dean of the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires.

“This country is home to 36 million people, and produces 70 million tons of grain a year, which makes us the top producer of grains per capita,” he pointed out.

According to Vilela’s estimates, Argentina – Latin America’s number three economy – produces nearly two tons of grains per inhabitant a year, six times what would be necessary to feed its population. In other words, Argentina produces enough food for 200 million people, but is unable to satisfy the basic needs of 36 million.

The situation is different “in India or in poor countries in Africa, which are not major food producers, which partly explains the hunger they suffer. But in Argentina it is immoral and inconceivable, and is the result of an unfair economic and political system, marked by unequal distribution of wealth,” said the professor.

The number of people living in poverty in Argentina skyrocketed from 12.2 million in May 2001 to 18.5 million a year later, the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC) reported last week. That means the proportion of the population whose basic needs are unmet soared from 35.9 to 53 percent in just 12 months.

And from May to August, the number of poor is estimated to have risen further, to 20 million, according to official projections. That total includes 8.7 million indigents, or people “without the income needed to afford a basic diet,” said INDEC director Juan Carlos del Bello.

Children have been hardest-hit by the dramatic rise in poverty. Seven of every 10 children under 14 belong to poor families, and the proportion is even higher in provinces like Formosa in the north, where nine out of 10 children are living below the poverty line.

“Last year, we were helping around 300 children, but now more than 450 come every day, and the donations are drying up,” said Cresta.

The Casa del Niño is run by the Catholic bishop’s office in Quilmes, on the south side of the capital, and is mainly financed by the state. The government, however, owes it four months of funding. “We are living on trust and on credit,” said the director.

Although Casa del Niño has no funds to pay its suppliers, it is not only attending to the needs of a growing number of children, but faces the challenge of helping teenagers and elderly persons who show up asking for something to eat.

The only thing Cresta can do is ask them to wait and see if there is any food left over after the children have eaten.

Some centres have been forced to serve milk only to children under three when there is not enough even for the four or five- year-olds, while other soup kitchens have had to make the difficult choice of turning away senior citizens with low or no incomes, putting priority on children and teenagers, when there is not enough to go around.

In some cases, soup kitchens have had to shut their doors on people waiting in line outside, explaining that there is not enough for everyone.

President Eduardo Duhalde’s chief of staff, Alfredo Atanasof, admitted last week that the new statistics on poverty highlighted the results of “an unjust economic model.”

“Perhaps previous governments denied these statistics,” or, even worse, “did not do a thing to ease the effects of this appalling reality on the weakest,” said Atanasof.