MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Poverty in Argentina is barely visible, says gov't

If you visit Argentina, you may not actually perceive that a third of its 39 million residents are poor but that is due to a curious phenomenon of their concentration into pockets, the government said yesterday.

Unlike what happens in most of Latin America, poor people in the country have social services such as health and education in their own neighborhoods. Hence, they travel less and are less visible, Deputy Social Welfare Minister Daniel Arroyo said. "There is the sensation that the poor are not actually 34 percent of the population," he stated at a forum sponsored by the Christian Association of Business Leaders (ACDE, in its Spanish acronym.) However, the visitor will probably not fail to catch a glimpse of poverty. Arroyo did not mention the thousands of so-called "cardboard scavengers" ? sometimes groups of several families with small children ? rifling through trash bags and littering streets, a view that was inexistent before millions were left unemployed as Argentina espoused neoconservative policies in the last decade, which the crisis that erupted in late 2001 did nothing but aggravate.

"Social inequality persists, or grows"

At the peak of the crisis, poverty reached the unprecedented level of 57 percent but it has been declining since the economy started to recover in 2002 after a five-year recession. However not only did social inequalities fail to narrow, they continued the same or even widened, said Agustín Salvia, author of the Argentine Catholic University's (UCA) Barometer of Social Debt, at the ACDE forum. Arroyo did not refute him. Over the last three years, GDP has grown more than 30 percent and industrial output by 40 percent, while extreme poverty declined to 12 percent from 30 percent and child mortality fell to 14 deaths per thousand from 17 per thousand, Salvia said. "Still the ratio of social spending to GDP continued stable or even decreased," he said, adding that crime and the housing deficit have worsened. Arroyo said that Argentina is now devoting 16 percent of its GDP to social spending as compared to the 20-22 percent of the developed countries but it is still well above the Latin American average. He also admitted that the income ratio between the richest 10 percent and poorest 10 percent in society is now 30-to-one, while during the peak of the crisis it stood at 44-to-one. He added that in the 1970s the ratio was seven-to-one.

A breakdown of poverty

Unemployment has now fallen to 10.8 percent from over 20 percent at the peak of the crisis. Arroyo said that of the 34 percent of the population classified as poor, 12 percent are structurally poor, those who have been poor for generations and who have no cement-floors or toilets; and 22 percent are the new poor, those who earn less than 860 pesos (about 290 dollars) per month, a benchmark that the government uses to define a four-member family as poor. He added that unemployment stands now at 10.8 percent. The figure, however, would be higher if the 1.35 million people who get a monthly 150-peso unemployment subsidy were to be considered jobless. Arroyo said that 46 percent of employed people have an informal job and that the government is devoting this year 400 million pesos to help people return to the labour market. Half that amount will go to recapitalization of ventures, a quarter to form production chains, and the remaining quarter to foster new ventures. The government is also restructuring subsidy plans so that mothers without primary studies will be able to opt instead for the family plan which is 150 pesos a month plus 25 pesos per child. "This doesn't demand a task from the beneficiary and is aimed at reducing structural poverty." Then, heads of households will also be able to opt for a training programme. People between 18 and 25 years of age already have six-month training programmes which now reach 100,000 but the government aims to extend that to 500,000 over the next two years, Arroyo said. He added that people between 18 and 25 who have no jobs feel totally alienated and even those that do work, feel the same way. "When you ask them what they see themselves becoming in the future, they reply that they are only thinking of the next three to five months. "That is their concept of the future." The government is also working on capitalization programmes, for instance, by financing the acquisition of machinery or other equipment. Arroyo said that those plans now benefit 54,000 ventures and 500,000 people.

Mum on political spending

"There is a Chinese proverb that says that rather than giving fish to a poor person, it is better to teach him to fish. We believe that we have to give them fish, teach them how to fish and ensure that the pond has plenty of fish," said Arroyo. But when the Herald, in a written question read aloud, asked about reports that millions of pesos in public funds were used to organize the political rally on May 25 and whether that was the government's concept of social welfare, Arroyo failed to respond.

By Guillermo Háskel Buenos Aires Herald