Almost half of those aged between 0 and 14 don’t have access to basic goods
The controversy surrounding poverty rates is unlikely to end anytime soon, but it now has an official source of data from which the debate can start, afer the INDEC statistics bureau yesterday released the first poverty and destitution figures since the previous administration cancelled the report in 2014, following widespread scepticism over its reliability.
Yesterday’s report said that roughly one third of Argentines do not live in households earning enough money to buy a basic basket of goods and services — 32.2 percent to be exact. A smaller subset of them, 6.3 percent of all citizens, do not even have enough to buy the food needed to meet the minimum monthly nutritional requirements for their diets.
That means that, in the 31 big cities surveyed, which total 27,201,000 Argentines, 8,772,000 people are poor, a figure that, when projected for a total estimated population of 43.5 million would mean almost exactly 14 million Argentines live below the poverty line.
The release of the figures prompted President Mauricio Macri to offer an immediate press conference in which he declared that INDEC had now “put the real numbers on the table”. He called the publication the “starting point” from which his administration should be evaluated.
The lack of credible official statistics since 2007 is likely to divide public opinion in at least two camps: those agreeing with the president’s position about an inherited social crisis, focusing on potential economic or social improvements in the future, and those arguing that improvements had been made previously.
Experts agree that poverty has increased since Macri was sworn in on December 10, following a devaluation that stoked inflation above increases in salaries or key social programmes such as the Universal Child Allowance (AUH). The Argentine Catholic University (UCA) has said that poverty rose from 29 percent in 2015 to 34.5 percent in the first quarter of 2016, a figure close to the one issued by INDEC yesterday, while destitution stood at 5.4 percent in UCA’s reports.
Their figures — as well as those from other institutions — rose to prominence during the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration, as the government’s widely-disbelieved poverty estimates of as low as 4.7 percent triggered soaring demands for other trustworthy sources of statistics.
Throughout the decade in which the Kirchnerite government did not supply credible statistics following the government intervention into INDEC’s inflation measurements in 2007, UCA said that poverty oscillated between 20 and 29 percent, edging closer to the latter figure in the last couple of years of CFK’s rule as both job creation and growth stagnated. Other think tanks, unions and universities released alternative poverty figures that went as low as 15 to 20 percent.
INDEC officials refused yesterday to give a full interpretation of the figures, limiting their words to saying that they valued alternative sources of data such as UCA’s, especially for their work during the “obscurantist years” of the past decade, to use current chief Jorge Todesca’s words.
Alarming data for the next generation
But setting aside the partisan quarrels, yesterday’s report revealed several alarming details about the social situation in the country.
According to INDEC, the poverty level reaches 47.4 percent for the youngest segment of the population, from 0 to 14 years of age, meaning that almost half of the next generation is now struggling with insufficient income in their families, far above the country’s average.
The next age strata is also struggling, with 38.6 percent of youths between 15 and 29 years old living in poverty. Only adults between 30 and 64 years old (27.5 percent) and senior citizens above 65 years old (8.1 percent) are less vulnerable than the average in terms of poverty.
On average, INDEC said, poor households are lacking an extra 4.800 pesos to meet an income level sufficient enough to pay for basic goods, while homes where destitution is prevalent would need 1,955 pesos more to escape that situation.
When compared to 2006’s data, the last year whose figures the new authorities said they backed, yesterday’s numbers suggested that destitution became proportionally less significant regarding poverty as a whole, a fact potentially pointing at how the social programmes helped cover the most basic of needs, such as food, but were not enough to tackle poverty in full. In January 2007, INDEC bureau reported 22 of poverty and 7.1 of destitution.
In the regional comparison (see graph), the regions with the worst figures proved to in the North and Cuyo regions.
As for destitution, the most alarming results were perhaps surprisingly in the Pampa region — whose figures were almost exactly the national average in terms of poverty. The region narrowly beat the Northeast in terms of the share of people whose households could not afford basic foodstuff in an average month, 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent. They were followed by Greater Buenos Aires, with 6.2 percent, the Northwest, with 4.8 percent and Cuyo, with 4.5 percent.
In line with historic trends, Patagonia saw the least concerning destitution numbers — 3.3 percent.
Data for rural, sparsely-populated areas was not included in this city-focused report.