Argentina is “New Face of Malnutrition,” Claims Spain’s El País Newspaper

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The renowned European daily cautioned that, along with Guatemala and Venezuela, relatively wealthy Argentina is “the new face of malnutrition and food insecurity.”

Jorge Galindo, a columnist for Madrid daily El País, published a detailed study of the economic crisis affecting these lands: “Venezuela, Argentina, and Guatemala are the new faces of malnutrition and food insecurity in Latin America,” he writes in the headline.

The columnist states at the beginning of his text: “There are fewer hungry people in the world today than there were twenty years ago, but not than in 2015. Since then, the percentage of undernourished people has remained at the same level. The Latin American region is no exception. To the contrary: north of the Panama Canal, rates have barely changed. To the south, they have even increased slightly.”

In the complete article published in El País, when referring to the specific case of Argentina, Galindo begins by distinguishing what happens with the Venezuelan crisis, which is discussed in a preceding paragraph. “Argentinian indicators are much less alarming.”

But it all depends on the comparison: if instead of the biggest humanitarian disaster in Latin America’s recent history we compare it to the country’s potential (as its own inhabitants usually do), it’s disheartening that one of the richest nations in the Southern Hemisphere is building poverty rather than destroying it,” he says. Some 94,000 people have become poor in the city of Buenos Aires in the last year. “Inflation again shoulders much of the blame.”

“Mauricio Macri’s government failed to tackle the debt crisis or the subsequent price escalation into which his predecessor, and now vice-presidential candidate, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, plunged the country. Inflation reached 55.8 percent year-on-year in June 2019: prices rise month-on-month in the country as much as in Chile year-on-year,” the text adds.

The study refers to a U-shaped rebound in poverty in Argentina and then a harsh consideration emerges: “Malnutrition and food insecurity has simply been parallel to an economic cycle that was never fixed. In the end, 2018 closed with 2,100,000 undernourished Argentinians, while their neighbors Chile and Uruguay reduced their numbers.”

Argentina remains submerged in a economic and social crisis one month before the Simultaneous and Compulsory Open Primary Elections (PASO). After the controversy over street dwellers, the former Minister of Social Development of Buenos Aires, Daniel Arroyo, challenged Mauricio Macri’s government’s economic and social policies.

In an interview with Radio Perfil FM 101.9, the congressman averred that “poverty and the social crisis have the face of a young man and woman in Argentina. The young are the most affected in Argentina. There are 1.5 million youths who neither study nor work. Almost 24 percent of young people are unemployed, 27 percent are in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires,” he said.