Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 26 2007 (IPS) – It just crushes you: children here, aged eight or nine, are sniffing glue to dull their hunger, says a rural medical doctor in Corrientes, 1,000 kilometres north of the capital and the province with the highest childhood poverty indicators in Argentina.
Many children and adolescents place contact adhesives in plastic bags and put them to their faces to breathe the solvent vapours released by the adhesive. Glue is the cheapest drug on the market and is not even illegal, as it is a common item that can be purchased in many shops.
National averages show that poverty in Argentina has been declining since 2003, when a record 54 percent of the country s 37 million people were below the poverty line after the economic and political collapse of late 2001.
But national data hide the situation in northeastern provinces like Corrientes, where poverty levels are much higher than in the rest of the country, and particularly affect children.
Statistics for late 2006 from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) showed that 26.9 percent of the Argentine population was living in poverty. But in Corrientes, that figure was 46 percent. Indigence (extreme poverty) was 8.7 percent nationally, but 18.1 percent in Corrientes. Children under 14, who are more numerous in low-income families, suffer from more and deeper poverty at all levels. In the country as a whole, 40.5 percent of children are poor. In the northeastern provinces, the proportion is 60 percent, and in Corrientes childhood poverty reaches 63.4 percent. INDEC uses two parametres to measure poverty. It defines as indigent people who cannot afford a basic basket of food representing their minimum energy and protein needs. The poor are those who cannot afford the complete basket which in addition to the basic food basket contains goods and services such as clothing, transport, education and healthcare.
According to INDEC s calculations, the basic food basket costs around 40 dollars a month per person in the northeastern region, while the complete basket is worth just over 85 dollars a month. The cost of the baskets varies in different regions of the country.
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Indigence affects the lives of 14.3 percent of children under 14 in Argentina overall, but in Corrientes the proportion is 31 percent.
The same picture is seen over and over again in every shantytown in the province, Dr. Francisco Martinez, who serves the low-income neighbourhoods and rural areas of Corrientes, told IPS.
The children are undernourished, inadequately fed, suffering from diarrhoea and pneumonia. The sad reality is that they have been abandoned by the state and by society, he said.
Most of the heads of these households receive income from a social programme for the unemployed, under which the government gives them 50 dollars a month. But the basic food basket for a family of four in the northeastern region costs about 160 dollars. And in Corrientes, much larger families are the norm.
Martinez, who works at the San Luis del Palmar hospital and also with Misioneros de la Esperanza (Missionaries of Hope), a lay Catholic group, pointed out that inadequate nutrition causes learning difficulties. When these children fail in school, they are doomed to become the (socially) excluded of the future, and the vicious circle of poverty is repeated.
In an interview with IPS, Martha Pelloni, a nun who heads the Human Rights Centre (Casa de Derechos Humanos) in Curuzú Cuatiá, a small town in Corrientes, explained that the province not only suffers from material poverty but also from a lack of human development among the most marginalised people.
Many people are unemployed and are living on the social programmes alone, and this does not provide them with a decent diet. But there is also illiteracy, lack of education and complete neglect on the part of the authorities, she said.
It is alarming that state institutions are incapable of having an impact on the quality of life of the poorest people. There is only one social worker at the Curuzú Cuatiá hospital, and she doesn t go out to visit people in the surrounding neighbourhoods, Pelloni said.
Sister Pelloni said that her organisation has a team of lawyers, psychologists and social workers, but they cannot respond to all the needs. We are not the government, and neither do we want just to provide welfare that encourages dependency, she said.
The state sends food aid and social programmes and the people survive, but they are inadequately fed, lose all their teeth, attend appalling hospitals, and even have to pay a contribution towards gasoline for the ambulance. We teach them to grow vegetables, because otherwise they would not eat any fresh produce, she said.
Among the poorest families, hunger begins to make its mark right from the mothers pregnancies, sources agreed. Many women have a large number of children; some have more than 10. Poor people here have a lot of children and a lot of dogs, Pelloni said.
Many of the children suffer from disabilities. It is common for families to have at least one child they describe as slow, forgetful or innocent, who are really disabled due to lack of a good diet, the nun said.
To deal with these problems, the Regional Institute of Medicine at the National University of the Northeast has implemented a programme in Corrientes that may curb childhood malnutrition and its associated illnesses.
The doctor coordinating the project, Daniel Merino, told IPS that the plan is to create a health profile of children aged seven months to 12 years who live in shantytowns in the provincial capital, which will include information about malnutrition, dental diseases, anaemia, parasites and tuberculosis.
Then they intend to identify community leaders to act as bridges between the experts and the target population, and initiate an educational dialogue with the residents in order to prevent or detect cases of malnutrition and its associated diseases, so that they can be treated immediately.
The crisis situation experienced by many residents in marginalised areas of the city of Corrientes is particularly serious among the child population, said Merino. The aim is for residents themselves, with the support of experts, to be the agents of their own solutions. *****
