Wednesday, September
26, 2012
Spain Recoils as Its Hungry
Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal
Samuel Aranda
for The New York Times
In Spain, the unemployment rate is over 50 percent
among young people. Austerity and hunger.
MADRID — On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night.
At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby.
"When you don't have enough money," she said, declining to give her name, "this is what there is." The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that
her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a
month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still
had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the
garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet.
Such
survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an
unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more
households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of
scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket
trash bins as a public health precaution.
A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas,
said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than
twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000.
As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget
targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing
one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries,
pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink.
Most
recently, the government raised the value-added
tax three percentage points,
to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items,
making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in
sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis,
are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school
lunches for low-income families.
For a
growing number, the food in garbage bins helps make ends meet.
At the huge
wholesale fruit and vegetable market on the outskirts of this city recently,
workers bustled, loading crates onto trucks. But in virtually every bay, there
were men and women furtively collecting items that had rolled into the gutter.
“It’s
against the dignity of these people to have to look for food in this manner,”
said Eduardo Berloso, an official in Girona, the city that padlocked its
supermarket trash bins.
The Caritas
report also found that 22 percent of Spanish households were living in poverty
and that about 600,000 had no income whatsoever. All these numbers are expected
to continue to get worse in the coming months.
About a
third of those seeking help, the Caritas report said, had never used a food
pantry or a soup kitchen before the economic crisis hit. For many of them, the
need to ask for help is deeply embarrassing. In some cases, families go
to food pantries in neighboring towns so their friends and acquaintances will not see
them.
“It is not
nice to see what is happening to these people,” said Manu Gallego, the manager
of Canniad Fruit. “It shouldn’t be like this.”
In Girona,
Mr. Berloso said his aim in locking down the bins was to keep people healthy
and push them to get food at licensed pantries and soup kitchens. As the locks
are installed on the bins, the town is posting civilian agents nearby with
vouchers instructing people to register for social services and food aid.
He said 80
to 100 people had been regularly sorting through the bins before he took
action, with a strong likelihood that many more were relying on thrown-away
food to get by.
A version of this article appeared in print on
September 25, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal
