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Argentina’s 8M feminist strike: Women are protesting Milei’s cuts and widespread hunger [1]

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Date: 2024-04 

Argentinian women from all walks of life will take to the streets nationwide on 8 March, International Women’s Day, as part of a feminist strike calling for an end to the country’s growing poverty, which already affects 57% of the population of 46 million.

The protesters’ “most important demand” is a solution to Argentina’s “food emergency”, said María Claudia Albornoz, an activist from La Poderosa, a group that defends the rights of the five million people living in the country’s 6,500 slums, or villas miseria (misery villages).

Three months after right-wing libertarian president Javier Milei took office, Argentina’s ever-increasing food inflation has reached 56%, according to the latest analysis from La Poderosa. Government data shows the country’s annual inflation rate is 254%.

Real-terms wages and pensions are deteriorating, and people go to supermarkets not knowing whether the money in their pockets will be enough to buy foods they could afford just a few days ago.

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Shoppers have one certainty, though: what were once basic goods such as shampoo are now luxury items. The small local grocery stores that allow their customers to pay on an informal trust-based credit system now keep track of only the items and quantities purchased, no longer bothering to note down the prices that are constantly rising.

The spiralling cost of living has been worsened still by Milei’s cuts to ‘ollas populares’, community kitchens run by social, civil and religious organisations, which are a last resort for the most impoverished families.

There are around 44,000 of these kitchens across Argentina, which were able to produce around 10 million meals a day last year.

Since then, Milei’s administration has stopped the government packages of non-perishable food staples, such as pasta, rice and yerba mate (a traditional herbal drink) being sent to these kitchens, arguing that it must conduct an audit on how they use these resources.

The cuts have led to “a very desperate situation”, said Albornoz, whose group La Poderosa runs 158 kitchens nationwide.

“Without these basic food staples, we cannot cook,” she said. “This causes us enormous distress, sadness and pain, because we can't feed our families, a role that is very much attached to women and gender non-conforming people.”

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/feminism-argentina-strike-food-crisis-8-march-javier-milei-inflation/

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