Preliminary data collected in the census carried out in Argentina on Wednesday (18) indicate that the country’s population has risen to just over 47 million.
In the last survey, carried out in 2010, Argentines totaled 40,117,096 inhabitants. Now they are 47,327,407 — nearly 18% growth. The survey carried out on Wednesday was scheduled for 2020, maintaining the practice of counting every ten years, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The increase in the Argentine population does not change the ranking of the countries with the most inhabitants in South America. Brazil, with 212.6 million people, remains isolated in the lead. In second place comes Colombia, with 50.1 million. Argentina and its 47 million inhabitants rank third.
On social media, President Alberto Fernández celebrated the figure. “We are more than 47 million Argentines and Argentines! Today, thanks to the efforts of each and everyone, we have more certainty to work for a better future”, he wrote.
The day the census takes place is a national holiday in Argentina. No commercial establishment can open, and only basic services remain in operation. The idea is that everyone stays at home waiting for the census takers to visit.
From 8 am to 6 pm, 650,000 volunteers visited Argentine homes. This year’s questionnaire presented some novelties. In addition to asking how many people live in each house and how many rooms each property has, questions related to racial and gender identity issues were introduced.
In addition to the “male” and “female” options, Argentines were also able to declare whether they see themselves as a trans woman, transvestite, trans man, transmale, non-binary or another identity. Regarding racial self-declaration, this year’s census also brought the options of “Afro-descendant” and “descendant of indigenous peoples”.
“The census is the exact image of who we are. We cannot plan where we want to go as a country if we do not know what we are, if we do not recognize ourselves in our cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic or sociodemographic diversities, and the census gives us this information” , said Marcos Lavagna, director of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec), a body equivalent to the IBGE.
Also according to provisional data, the Argentine census revealed that 52.83% of the population are women and 47.05% are men; 0.12% said they did not recognize themselves under any of these categories.
There is no forecast for the dissemination of the consolidated results, and they can take up to eight months, since part of the population was questioned in person and another digitally. For the first time in the country, there was the option to respond to the census through an internet form, an option chosen by about 23.8 million Argentines, just over 50% of the population, according to Indec.
In the first census carried out in Argentina, in 1895, 1.8 million people were counted. In 1914 the figure was 7.9 million, and in 1947 it rose to 15.9 million. From 1960, when 20 million inhabitants were registered, the census started to be carried out every ten years and showed an average increase of 4 million people per decade until reaching 40.1 million in 2010.
