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Brazil returned to the FAO Hunger Map, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, after eight years. In 2014, after a decade of social programs promoted by former presidents Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, the most populous country in Latin America had managed to get out of this statistic. What happened? X-ray of the debts of President Jair Bolsonaro with the Brazilians.
Today, at least 33 million Brazilians are hungry, according to data from the Brazilian Network for Research on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security (Penssan). In addition, more than 60 million people suffer from food insecurity, that is, they do not have sufficient access to food, despite living in a country considered to be one of the largest food producers and exporters in the world.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic crisis, which had been dragging on since the second term of Dilma Rousseff, worsened. Images of people scavenging for bones and animal remains shocked public opinion. Many Brazilian supermarkets have started selling bones and watered down milk to encourage purchases among the most disadvantaged.
Faced with this panorama, many people survive thanks to the solidarity of friends and strangers. Once a month, Philosophy and Literature professor Roberto Ponciano delivers basic food baskets to dozens of families living in a popular neighborhood built as part of the ‘Minha casa, minha vida’ program. They left the Alemão favela complex, in Rio de Janeiro, during the Workers’ Party governments.
Today they are trying to stay afloat despite the crisis and unemployment. “Many neighbors can’t even pay the monthly community fee. Things are ugly”, explains Russo, a neighborhood representative.
It’s Saturday morning and about twenty people are waiting in line for the distribution to begin. “We started this work in the midst of the pandemic. But it was not because of the pandemic. People here were already unemployed a long time ago. They told us: ‘The food doesn’t arrive, our children are hungry’. We managed to donate 153 baskets per month, but today we did not get more than 100, because the people who were donating are no longer in a position to continue doing so. We have less and less money to help these people,” says Ponciano.
Since Bolsonaro came to power, the situation is difficult
Ana Cristina Pires de Oliveira picks up her basket with oil, rice, beans, pasta and other food, and heads home. It is a significant help for her diminished economy.
She is a nursing assistant and has been unemployed for nine months. Her husband’s salary was also reduced within a program approved by the Executive to avoid massive layoffs. “He had to accept because we are already over 40 years old and there is nowhere to run, there is no job. Since Bolsonaro came to power, the situation is difficult. I myself have noticed it and all the people I know are the same”, affirms Ana Cristina.
The claw of deforestation is raging in the Amazon
For his detractors, the hunger and impoverishment of a part of the population are the legacy left by President Jair Bolsonaro after four years of government, along with uncontrolled deforestation. The Brazilian Amazon registers the worst rates of the last 15 years. Malicious fires have also intensified, reaching the most critical level since 2010.
Many professionals who fight against environmental crimes accuse Bolsonaro of having financially strangled the main control bodies of the Amazon forests, such as the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Conservation. of Biodiversity (ICMBio). Both have been militarized and their budgets have been drastically cut.
Not even the commissioners of the Federal Police (PF) are exempt from strict government control. Alexandre Saraiva, superintendent of the PF in the State of Amazonas, became nationally known after carrying out a macro-operation against illegal timber trafficking. he was considered the largest arrest in the history of Brazil by the local press. The agents seized 226,000 cubic meters of logs, valued at 24 million dollars.
Commissioner Saraiva accused the former Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, of being linked to the incriminated businessmen. Shortly after, he was exonerated and sent to a small police station in the city of Volta Redonda, in the State of Rio de Janeiro. As a federal deputy, he hopes to combat environmental crimes from Brasilia by law.
“The legacy of the Bolsonaro government for the Amazon is destruction. It is the complicity with organized crime that is destroying the Amazon, trying to blame the indigenous people, the journalists, the indigenists, all those people who are there to fight crime, as if they were to blame for being victims. We had never seen anything like this in Brazil”, he points out.
The economy has also been hard hit during Bolsonaro’s administration, a situation that the president attributes to the pandemic, the social isolation policy implemented by the governors, and the energy crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.
Brazil’s public debt has grown two points since 2019 and is around 78% of GDP. Of course, unemployment registers the best data of the last seven years, standing at 9.3%. However, high inflation and the per capita income of Brazilians continue to worry specialists.
