A Shirt For Rice: Bartering To Survive In Inflation-battered Argentina

Lomas de Zamora, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 15th Nov, 2023) An old T-shirt for a handful of rice or some eggs: ever more Argentines are relying on barter to survive in a fast-worsening economy dominating the debate ahead of presidential elections Sunday.

On the side of a dusty road in the impoverished Villa Fiorito neighborhood in Buenos Aires province, locals display old clothes, shoes or used household items on blankets spread out on the ground.

Articles of clothing are exchanged for a bag of pasta, some sugar, and a few biscuits. Some items sell for a few hundred pesos -- the equivalent of a few dimes.

"food is very expensive," 25-year-old Luz Lopez told AFP from behind her makeshift stall on the edge of a small square of Villa Fiorito -- celebrated for giving the world Diego Maradona, whose image oversees the bustling trade from numerous large murals in his honor.

In and around the teeming Argentine capital, it is an increasingly common sight for people to knock on doors asking for second-hand clothes to wear, barter or sell.

"Sometimes you're out walking, you find things, you wash them and bring them here" to trade, Lopez, a mother of two small children, said about her frustratingly limited options for making ends meet.

Elsewhere on the square, 28-year-old Maria Fernanda Diaz told AFP she sleeps under a pedestrian bridge and lives mainly on alms.

"Let the politicians come here to see how we live!" she exclaimed.

Four in every ten Argentines today live below the poverty line, according to official figures, with year-on-year inflation at 143 percent.

"Every day there are new prices," said Emilce Elisabeth Bravo, a 35-year-old mother of two who also tries to get by selling odds and ends she collects where she can.

"Diapers are very expensive -- previously a pack cost 2,600 pesos, today it is 4,500 pesos (almost $13)," she said, in a country where the monthly minimum wage was equal to about $420 in November.