Extreme poverty soars to affect six million in Argentina, study shows

Destitution has grown at a far quicker rate to poverty over the past year in Argentina, a new study shows – in the first quarter of 2024, more than six million people were not covering their basic nutritional needs.

The report, issued by the University of Buenos Aires Economics Faculty’s Centro para la Recuperación Argentina, evaluates quarterly and half-year data from the EPH (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares) household survey of the INDEC national statistics bureau. 

According to researchers, if indicators from the first quarters of 2023 and 2024 are compared, the number of people not covering their basic needs grew 43.3 percent from the previous year, with a 131-percent rise in the case of those who cannot manage four daily meals (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner). This means, continues the document, that “almost 11.5 percent of the Argentine population passed into destitution”over this period.

Beyond that number, the question is the medium-term and long-range effects of this reality.

“The first thing to point out is that if these levels of destitution are maintained for any more length of time, structural poverty will increase,” a representative from the Centro para la Recuperación Argentina told Perfil.

“If the economy grows and destitution goes down, there would not be any direct impact on structural poverty (which in Argentina has a core figure of 30 percent) but rather on a percentage of poverty varying according to the economic conditions at each moment,” they added. 

Nevertheless, the growth of destitution rates “could have a long-term impact on segments of children and the young because emerging from destitution deposits them in poverty in the medium term, substantially restricting their opportunities.”

‘Structural poverty’

Between the first quarters of this year and last, 3,410,300 people have swollen the sector of the population lacking the necessary money to eat every day, taking the total already up to 6,012,772 individuals. 

If this state of affairs is consolidated, it is far more probable that a new floor of structural poverty will be formed.

“Structural poverty is people living in conditions where economic fluctuations do not affect them because an improvement in their incomes will not take them out of where they are,” concluded the UBA body.

The prestigious Observatorio de la Deuda Social (ODSA) of the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) defines people in structural poverty as those “presenting a high- intensity level of deprivation of social rights and who are also poor in income terms.”

ODSA researcher Juan Ignacio Bonfiglio told Perfil: “If we understand structural poverty as a situation in which people find themselves deprived in multiple dimensions with great difficulties in escaping that situation of want, we might think of a negative feedback whereby deprivation is associated with very low income levels not even permitting access to food with an impact on the possibilities of investing in education and being able to ensure minimal sanitary or housing conditions."

He added: "Those are effects with negative feedback between themselves which make it more difficult to escape poverty.”

Nevertheless, Bonfiglio also explained that “the major increases in poverty and destitution, as we have experienced them, are often highly cyclical situations.” 

During crises destitution can hit high peaks “but that situation tends to be reversed before too long,” said the expert

The problem, he argued, lies in “how much is reversed and how much produces a new floor.”

Bonfiglio explained that “while we could not affirm that this is happening, we have motives to think that this could happen and that the conditions building up for some time contribute to that.”

“It is a hypothesis to be proven, a very bold affirmation but one with a certain substantiation,” he concluded.

Below the line

INDEC’S last midyear report on poverty and destitution showed 52.9 percent of the people lying below the poverty line with 18.1 percent destitute within that total. 

If the data is compared with the same period of 2023, poverty has risen 12.8 percentage points while destitution is up 8.8 points.

“Destitution speaks of access to a minimal consumption of food being impossible, a line implying being able to eat enough to get up in the morning and nothing more than that,” economist Hernán Letcher of the CEPA (Centro de Economía Política Argentina) think tank told Perfil in an interview.

If those levels of poverty and destitution are maintained, he added, “it becomes more difficult to get those people out of that situation.”

“A growth in economic activity is not enough,” he continued. “If I get a job tomorrow, I emerge from poverty” but “if I’m among the structurally poor for a long time, I probably cannot even go out to look for a job. That’s a bit of the logic,” he summed up.