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One of the most important and least important points
comments on the speech by President Jair Bolsonaro Creator of Brazil Aid at the General Assembly of the
UN was this: Impressive, right? But
perhaps even more impressive are the data released by IBGE less than
a week before the president's speech: More than 10 million Brazilians live
in a situation of severe food insecurity, according to the agency. In other words,
this crowd, which includes children, literally goes hungry in Brazil. But
as after all the same country that feeds a large part of the planet has at
at the same time so many millions of hungry people? I'm Ricardo Senra, a reporter for BBC News Brazil
here in London, and in this video I explain three key points of this sad
contradiction. And I also do an x-ray of hunger and food production in
Brazil. To do this, I spoke to some of the country's leading experts in
topics such as access to adequate food and hunger. I'll talk more about this later, but
Let's start with the x-ray of hunger based on budget research
family members, the POF, from IBGE, released on September 17, and which
refers to the years 2017 and 2018. She identified that the total number of people with
food in sufficient and satisfactory quantity in Brazil is the lowest
of the last 15 years. It is worth remembering that all this happens shortly after the country
finally leaving the United Nations Hunger Map, an achievement that was
applauded worldwide in 2014. Well, according to a new survey 10.3
millions of Brazilians were going hungry during the uprising. This is an increase
3 million people without normal access to meals in just five years. This figure does not include people living on the streets, which would make this scenario, according to
experts, even more dramatic Hunger in Brazil is recorded
mainly in rural areas, another contradiction since food is
produced in these regions. Of these more than 10 million Brazilians who pass through
hunger, according to IBGE, 7.7 million live in urban areas, while 2.6 million are
in rural areas. The crux of the matter here is proportion. This data shows that 23.3% of the urban population is hungry, while 40.1% of the population
rural areas are going through the same situation. According to the research, of the total
Brazilians who were starving during the period investigated, 41.5% lived in
Northeast region, followed by the Southeast and the North. Here we need to
understand three important concepts in this discussion. What are insecurity
Mild, moderate and severe food insecurity Mild food insecurity occurs when
the family is not sure if they will be able to access food in
future and when the food on the table is already bad. According to the
IBGE: “In this context, residents adopt strategies to maintain a
minimum quantity of food available.” Swap one food for another
that is cheaper, for example. Moderate insecurity arises when the
residents have a limited amount of food. That is, when there is less
food in the pantry than is satisfactory Finally, serious insecurity appears, in
words IBGE, when residents experienced severe deprivation in consumption
of food. That's where the definition of hunger fits in. And if we
considering these 3 types of insecurity, we arrive at the problem of access to
quality food, which is also serious in Brazil. According to the IBGE, at
less than half of children under 5 lived in homes with some degree of
food insecurity. That equates to 6.5 million children. Now, if the
reference for serious insecurity, hunger in fact, 5.1% of children
under 5 years old and 7.3% of people between 5 and 17 years old
live in this condition in Brazil. There are a lot of people! This brings me
for the second point of this video: the x-ray of food production in Brazil. Unlike
from what President Jair Bolsonaro stated, Brazil does not emerge as the
main food producer on the planet. Today it is the third, behind only
China and the United States, according to the Brazilian Industry Association
Food, which is the largest representative of the country's food industry,
Brazil exported food to more than 180 countries last year. And these exports
moved US$$ 34.1 billion last year. Most of US$$ 36.8 billion was
to Asia, mainly China. Next comes the European Union, with 18.8% of exports, and the Middle East, with 14.3%. The association brings
Interesting information: we are the second largest food exporter in the world
industrialized in volume and the fifth in value. We are the first producer and
exporter of orange juice worldwide, the second producer and the first
world exporter of sugar. The second producer and the first exporter
world's largest beef producer and poultry producer. We are also the second
world exporter of instant coffee and this surprised me! Brazil is the second
world producer of chocolates and sweets Well, but here we go to the heart
from this video: why producing so much food and having so much food to eat
export we have so many hungry Brazilians. The first point here is who
feeds who. It is important to differentiate the role of agribusiness from that of small businesses
family farmers in food production in Brazil. Maybe you
surprise again. According to the latest IBGE agricultural census,
70% of the food consumed by Brazilians comes from
family farming. We are talking here about small lands, managed
by people from the same family or from close families, who produce for
own food and sell the surplus Family farming is different from
large monocultures of soy or coffee or those large livestock pastures and
agribusiness. It produces a huge diversity of foods: cassava and
vegetables to corn, milk and fruits. And it is thanks to her that our
dish can be plentiful and colorful, as recommended by nutritionists. The famous
agribusiness, which corresponds to large producers, is responsible for a large part
of the Brazilian GDP, has representatives at various levels of politics, it is
mainly intended for export I spoke about this subject with Daniel
Balaban, who is the director of the Center of Excellence against Hunger of the Program
UN World Food Programme in Brazil He told me the following: “Agribusiness,
that's why the name is business, right? He goes where they pay more, where he earns more, there is
more profit. So, as a dollar at R$ 5.50, a dollar
overvalued, made the Brazilian product very cheap for
export. He prefers to export, in which he will get the
every dollar he receives he is receiving R$ 5.50 of what he puts here in
Brazil at R$ 5.50 and, of course, compared to the basic prices of
food here, you understand? Let's see a 1 kg package of rice, right? As is the case
of rice that has gone up too much, so he will always prefer to export, while he
there is a market abroad. So much so that Brazilian agribusiness exports everything
that he has and only what there is no market abroad he puts here.” Kiko
Afonso, who is the executive director of Ação da Cidadania, the NGO founded by
Betinho, to combat hunger and poverty in Brazil, says that the policy of
Brazilian agriculture is geared towards exports. What in his words
It may be good for the economic balance, but terrible for local consumption,
Especially for the most vulnerable populations. “Look, so you add two
big factors, right? A government policy that looks at agribusiness to
export to the detriment of small producers,
which makes food more expensive. And a second aspect, where you have a
absurd social inequality, where the vast majority of the population lives with a
salary well below an acceptable average to survive.” And here we come into
another important point in this story: the attention given to family farming,
the one that puts food on the Brazilian table, as we have seen, has shrunk.
“For example, small family farmers had the PAA,
Food Acquisition Program, right? This program even had a budget
billionaire, right? A R$ 1.5 billion a year Today, it doesn't reach R$ 100 million. The
Pronaf, which is the Family Farmer Support Program, right? It decreased a lot.
the number of loans for them, which they had with subsidized interest and others
programs, for example, rainwater harvesting. Brazil also had a cistern program that it supported. This also fell drastically. This rural population
she is very vulnerable. So she needs to be constantly encouraged and
being supported by government public policies.” “And we are talking about a lot of people
who may die of hunger in the coming months in Brazil. Our founder, the
Betinho always said this: that hunger is one of the worst, if not the worst, indignity.
that a human being can have.” And I take advantage of this hook to enter the third
point. It is striking that hunger in Brazil is concentrated in
rural regions, as we said, those where food is produced. What
What do experts say about this? I also spoke to economist Marcelo
Neri, who is a professor at FGV and former president of Ipea and former chief minister
of the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs of the Presidency of the Republic between
2013/2015. He told me that “the rural dweller is the poorest, he is the one who produces food but does not earn enough to buy it.” In
2019, according to professor 53% of the 20% poorest in the
Brazil and 10% of the 20% richest in Brazil declared
that there was no money for food. In the rest of the world, according to him, the numbers
there were 48% in the poorest 20%, and 21% in the richest 20%. In other words, he explains, our poor people today have more insecurity
food than the rest of the world, while our richest have less.
It’s the famous “Brazilian inequality,” he says. The other experts
agree with him. “Brazil has had many policies to help small
family farmers in the past, and these policies have lost strength in
last governments. At the end of Dilma's government, Temer and now. So, this makes
so that, in addition to decreasing production, they do not produce and end up going hungry.
in the field.” “And they end up having to migrate or
urban centers to live in slums and super poor regions, in super conditions
difficult, or they have to adapt to working for these big
agribusiness.” Now, a question many of you may be asking is
next: how does the new coronavirus pandemic affect the hunger scenario in
Brazil. Daniel Balaban, from the Center of Excellence against Hunger of the
UN World Food Programme answers this question: “It’s sad to say this, but
Brazil has an income, an average income of R$ 480. Suddenly, when 65
millions of people received R$ 600 in their account, Brazil decreased
incredibly, during this period of emergency resources, the number of
people below the poverty line.” In fact, a survey by FGV released in
July showed that the share of the population living in extreme poverty fell from 4.2
for 3.3% of the population It is the lowest rate of the
last 40 years in Brazil. The concept of extreme poverty refers to those
people living on less than US$1.90 per day or R$1.54 per month.
But is this a reason to celebrate? “If we already had these more than
80 million Brazilians are at some level of food insecurity, whether mild,
moderate or severe, right? This number will certainly increase. The recession and the
crisis are clearly not issues that will be resolved in the short term. The
unemployment is already almost a record in Brazil and we clearly see that the aid
emergency is unsustainable in the current model.” The UN director agrees: “The
The whole problem is that when these emergency resources run out, we go back to
previous problem, because the previous problem was structural, and this resource is
emergency.” Marcelo Neri, from FGV, told me the following about the pandemic in Brazil: “According to our latest survey, despite the drop in
record labor income of 20.5% in the pandemic, around 13.1 million
of people escaped poverty in the midst of the pandemic.” What explains this paradox, he says, is the generous, in quotation marks, granting of emergency aid that
reached 67 million Brazilians at a cost of R$322 billion during
2020. The problem is that the aid ends on December 31st. He says: “And then it’s not just the former poor who will return to their initial condition. They will have the company of
new poor displaced by the pandemic.” I also wanted to know if the numbers on the
hunger in Brazil released by IBGE surprised these experts. Give a
look at the answers: “Unfortunately, for Citizenship Action, they are not surprising,
it's because we knew about the dimension, right, of what was coming. We knew about
dimension of the families that were on the edge asking us for food, instead of
education, health, etc. When a person gives up these other rights to ask for
food, it is because the situation is really very serious.” Marcelo Neri brought new
data and said that the results of the IBGE survey challenge those who
believe that hunger is a thing of the past in Brazil. “Before they attack the
messenger, we observe the same drama in international evidence about Brazil.”
The proportion of those who do not have money to buy food falls from
20% up to 18% and then rises to 30% in 2017/2018, which is consistent in terms of period and deadlines with the last
IBGE survey. This same level of 30% is maintained in 2019. The
people here at BBC News Brasil will continue to monitor the numbers and
mainly the real stories of millions of Brazilians who
are starving right now. Thank you for following us
so far. I hope this video has helped you understand, to know
more about this sad scenario and we'll be back soon with more videos. See you soon
there!
