Food policies in Argentina: scope and limitations in their implementation

Abstract

The difficulties faced by a sector of the population in gaining access to food is not a recent issue of public interest. In Argentina, it began to take on greater political relevance with the return of democracy, in a context marked by the impoverishment of workers. As a result, the social issue became detached from power relations and the state's response to it was reduced to a food issue. The implementation of the National Food Plan set the course of the - depoliticised - food policies of the 1990s, in a context where social exclusion and polarisation were profoundly accentuated. Together with the economic and labour reactivation at the beginning of the new millennium, food policy implemented with a human rights perspective from the central level gained renewed impetus as the crisis was overcome. In this brief overview, food policies have shown transformations and continuities that revitalise some of the debates on the structural problems underlying access to food and state responses. Drawing on contributions from the notion of food security/sovereignty and the right to food, this article proposes to analyse the food policies implemented since the return of democracy to the present day, taking into account their scope and limitations.