September 24, 2019

Argentina passes an emergency food law

topic:	Food Security
located:	Argentina
editor:	Magdalena Rojo

The economic situation in Argentina has escalated into weeks of mass protests that have recently led to the Argentinian Senate approving an emergency food law.

The Latin American country is facing a deep recession, with one of the highest inflation rates in the world and the Argentinian peso losing two-thirds of its value against the dollar since the start of 2018. The country's economy contracted by 5.8 percent in the first quarter of 2019. As a result of these events, Argentines have been protesting for weeks against growing poverty and unemployment. Voices from local social movements, which emerged during the crisis in 2001, say that if they had stopped cooking food for the poor, the government would have noticed how critical the situation was two years ago already.

According to the report of the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA), at the end of 2018, almost one-third of the population in the country lived under the poverty line. The leader of the research, Agustín Salvia, the director of UCA's Social Debt Observatory, told MercoPress that the poverty increase is "due to the growth of income poverty, lower wages, loss of employment and greater job insecurity, in the inflationary and stagnation context".

Teachers at schools have been complaining that kids come to school hungry and they are not able to provide them snacks as it was in the past. Bakeries are giving away bread they do not sell, with queues of people searching for food becoming longer and longer every day. Even though the current president Mauricio Macri resisted the bill at first, ultimately the Senate passed the emergency law that will increase financial support for food programmes by 50 percent.

Some Argentinians doubt the level of hunger in the country. Others say this law is not a solution and the next government will have to face the same challenges.

There are also voices calling the poverty a slogan for the upcoming presidential campaign. In the presidential primaries in August, Macri lost to a left-wing ticket of Alberto Fernandez and former president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner.

Argentina is expecting its presidential elections in October. Until then, social movements serve people living in poverty daily; they continue cooking for the poor, including the Argentinian low-middle class.

(Photo: CCC/Facebook)