Northwestern Argentina (NOA)

Abstract

The six provinces that make up Northwestern Argentina (NOA) cover an area of 560,000 km2. In 2010, about five million people lived there, representing 12% of the Argentine population. Nature has played a predominant role in the human occupation of this territory, either from a restrictive expression, defined by the existence of sectors with major obstacles to the development of human life; relative, associated with its changing meaning according to material practices or regressive, linked to the effects of indiscriminate exploitation. From the natural point of view, there is no criterion that unifies this group. Neither could it be said that there is a cultural homogeneity that gives a characteristic seal to this portion of the country, since there is also diversity what prevails. It can be said, however, that the northwest of Argentina is today a peripheral region and is associated in the popular imagination with conditions of poverty, low quality of life and extreme inequalities, which are expressed in different stages and processes of territorialization and reterritorialization. These processes resulted, throughout history, in the construction of differentiated territories, whose economic base was based on agroforestry, agricultural, agro-industrial or mining activities, to mention the most important ones. The preeminence of any of these activities, or their overlapping over time, defined the construction of highly unequal territories—whatever the time analyzed—where the binomial inequality-poverty and enormous social differences were almost the norm. The interest of this chapter is focused on analyzing the impact of the territorial transformations that took place during the first decade of the twenty-first century on the quality of life in the region. To this end, it is first necessary to study the changes that occurred in population growth and quality of life between 2001 and 2010, which will make it possible to establish which were the most important dimensions that intervened, their magnitude and the way in which they were distributed in the territory. This finding makes it possible to establish some contingency relationships between the course of the quality of life throughout the decade and the evolution of the logics of territorial construction. Under these premises, it is proposed that the logics of the territorialization processes that have intersected in the region throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century should be considered as a factor in the interpretation of the main problems. They not only affect living conditions, but also have an impact on demographic characteristics, on the structure of consumption and production, on the course of economic processes and on the features of the “materialization” of capitalism in the region. To a large extent, all these circumstances are expressed in the quality of life of the population of the NOA, which has some of the worst conditions in the country.