Poverty: a tragic scene in Latin America

“The outlook of poverty in Latin America grew grimmer in the 1990s and reverting that situation calls for rich countries to knock down trade barriers that put a damp on export possibilities,” Argentine newspaper El Clarin reported today.

The influential daily retook the proposals made in a report issued by the World Bank (WB) with a view to talk regional nations into reaching a hands-on commitment to let everybody -especially poor people- have access to education and health care systems.

In its editorial, El Clarin added that “adequate conditions must be in place to spur up both investment and productivity, as well as to achieve specific improvements in the population’s living standards.”

The morning paper cited figures released by the World Bank in which 170 million people of the 510 million total inhabitants in Latin America and the Caribbean are living way below the poverty line and barely making ends meet with less than two dollars a day.

Out of that number of poor people, some 70 million live in extreme poverty or with less than one dollar a day.

“In Latin America alone, the amount of beggars jumped from 48 million in 1990 to 57 million in 1999, while the number of poor people soared from 121 to 132 million in the same span of time,” the paper said.

According to the World Bank -the newspaper disclosed- sluggish economic growth is to blame for the increase in poverty.

“After posting a meager 0.4 percent growth in 2001, the Gross National Product of Latin America and the Caribbean shrank by 1.3 percent in 2002, mostly as a result of deep recessions in Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela,” the daily pointed out.

For the WB, the 10.9 percent downturn endured by Argentina in 2002 “was deeper than anticipated due to the delayed reestablishment of the payment system, the banking crisis and the lack of consensus to get a macroeconomic program going.”

Furthermore, “the Argentine crisis spilled over onto the Uruguayan banking system and played havoc with both exports and tourism in Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, let alone the fact that it curbed money remittances sent by Bolivian and Paraguayan workers overseas.”

As to the outer factors that turned Latin Americans into poorer beings, the newspaper considers that despite low interest rates in industrialized nations, the flow of private capital dropped off by $31 billion last year.

“The economic slowdown in the U.S. and Europe put a spoke in the wheel of Latin America’s export demand, a situation that drove a wedge into the region’s exports that eventually fell off from 11.9 percent in 2000 to a tiny 1.2 percent last year,” El Clarin concluded.