The “new child poverty” appears in Argentina behind each figure, each life story and harshly punishes children between 0 and 17 years of age: the level of monetary poverty among children is 61.6% and thus reaches 8.2 million. juvenile.
Not only this: the situation of food insecurity affects more than 30% of minors and thus today there are more than 4.2 million minors who have problems eating in Argentina.
The data comes from the latest report of the Observatory of the Social Debt of Argentina of the Catholic University (UCA) and is entitled “Return to the path of deprivations that mark childhood.”
There, another outstanding piece of information is revealed: in the last year there was a substantial increase in social assistance in terms of programs such as the Food Card, the AUH or school canteens (it went from 48.2% in 2021 to 49.8% in 2022) but with all this poverty in minors has not decreased. On the contrary, there are evidences of extreme cases of child poverty in Greater Buenos Aires of 57.4%, in the NEA of the country of 57.1%, in Cuyo of 53.4% and in the NOA of 54 percent.
welfare and poverty
Social aid grows and especially in middle sectors. But poverty does not decrease substantially. This speaks of an increasingly impoverished middle class where the first affected are children, the new poor that appear”, pointed out the coordinator of the UCA research, Ianina Tuñon.
The situation of food insecurity is another of the highly alarming phenomena. Although it has decreased after the social crisis of Covid-19, it still affects more than 30% of children in 2022, and direct and indirect food coverage has increased significantly, particularly in lower-middle-class children who they have also been affected by monetary poverty. In other words, there are some 4.2 million children who have problems eating and among these, a total of 1.6 million suffer from severe hunger.
Tuñon evaluated in this sense that social assistance fails to curb poverty since inflation rates beat the pocket of middle-class families and lower sectors. Thus, the coordinator of the UCA report revealed that “childhood is an opportunity to look at social problems and poverty that has not gone down.”
The data constructed indicate that the right to food for minors in the country is an outstanding debt whose general balance is negative. Indeed, between 2010 and 2022, the situation of food insecurity increased by 44%, however, the greatest deterioration has been recorded in the last five years.
