Poverties, ruralities and peasants in the Chaco Argentino in early XXI century

Abstract

The peasant-indigenous populations in the Argentine Chaco are affected by the continued expansion of the agricultural frontier. However, it is difficult to assess the magnitude and scope of the problem, given the imprecision in the knowledge of certain basic features of these social groups, such as the geographical distribution. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the poverty conditions of peasants and indigenous in the Chaco in the early twenty-first century, as a necessary step in order to better understand the impacts of the expansion of the agricultural frontier in this area. For this purpose, we propose an approach to rural poverty from epidemiology, specifically through the analysis of the diseases of poverty. Between the main results we highlight the identification of prevalence areas of peasant-indigenous in Chaco region and the characterization of these areas according to their poverty and technological capitalization. Information sources used were: National Population Census 2001, Vital Statistics from 1995 to 2001, and National Agricultural Census 2002.