By Miguel Lo Bianco and Juan Carlos Bustamante
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Some Argentines, hit by tough austerity under libertarian President Javier Milei, are rummaging for food and taking on more informal low-salary jobs, even as hope rises that the most painful period may be over as inflation cools.
Milei took office at the end of 2023, pledging to take a “chainsaw” to state spending to overturn a deep fiscal deficit and rein in triple-digit inflation.
That saw poverty spike to 53% in the first half of last year from 41.7% six months earlier, even as the economy began to stabilize and inflation dropped.
“There are more and more people rummaging through dumpsters here, foraging,” said Jorge Silvero, a Buenos Aires resident who survives by scavenging in the suburb of Tapiales.
“People coming to look and take a small bag of bagallo, as we say, some vegetables home. They have enough to eat, at least to take home. But there is a terrible hunger.”
There is hope that the worst hardship might be over. The government will release poverty data for the second half of 2024 later on Monday, which is expected to come down sharply as inflation has dropped to 67% from near 300% last April.
“Now we have price stability, or at least macroeconomic stability and much lower inflation,” Agustin Salvia, director of the Argentina Social Debt Observatory at the Catholic University of Argentina, told Reuters.
He warned, however, that income levels for workers, retirees, and pensioners remained below what they were at the end of 2023, and that many people were taking on “more precarious, subsistence jobs, and informal work.”
Jose Rolando Ailan, who was looking for discarded fruits and vegetables outside another market in Tapiales, said significantly more people were out searching for food to get by.
“I’ve never seen people coming here to scavenge like they are now,” he said. “It makes me feel sad to see men and women coming here with their children just to scrape by.”
(Reporting by Miguel Lo Bianco and Juan Bustamante; Writing by Nicolás Misculin and Natalia Siniawski; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Bill Berkrot)
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