Argentinian Nutritional Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century: An Agribusiness, Ultra-Processed Food and Malnutrition Recipe

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to address the impact of the nutritional inequalities on the Argentinian population as an inherent component of the current transition of the agri-food chains in which hunger and obesity may coexist. The alarming increase in the percentage of malnutrition by excess is the consequence of an agri-food system specialized in low cost production of calories from ecosystems characterized by their excessive simplification. Diet degradation and loss of diversity are based on new forms of social appropriation of space, such as monoculture, which transfer social inequalities to the environmental and nutritional field. Argentina produces calories to support 400 millions of human beings and most of those calories are also proteins of high biological value. This is an atypical situation in developing countries; however, it does not mean these countries are exempted from the accelerated growth of malnutrition in their population. This is about a change in the consumption patterns in which the more ultra-processed foods there are, the more fresh foods decrease. This distances food producers and consumers who break off the existing social ties in the creation of the diet.