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BRAZIL:
Progress and
Pitfalls on the Road to Zero
Hunger
Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, (IPS) -
Two years after its launch, the
Brazilian government's Zero
Hunger Programme has yielded
some impressive results, like
the 6.5 million families
provided with special grants,
but it has also earned its share
of criticism.
José Giácomo Baccarin, the
secretary of food and
nutritional security at the
Ministry of Social Development
and coordinator of Zero Hunger,
described it to IPS as a public
policy aimed at effectively
linking numerous government
programmes, all of which are
making reasonable progress that
should become more tangible
throughout the coming year.
The grant programme, for
example, will be extended to
encompass 8.7 million families
this year, and should reach all
of the families deemed at risk
of malnutrition -- a total of
11.4 million -- by next year.
Through this initiative, each
household involved receives up
to 95 reals (35 dollars) in
assistance every month. The
average allotment last year was
66 reals (24 dollars) monthly.
For his part, Flavio Valente,
coordinator of the
non-governmental group Brazilian
Action for Nutrition and Human
Rights, praised Zero Hunger for
its underlying aim and broad
scope, but said that a shortage
of resources has led to greater
emphasis on emergency measures
like the grant programme and
free food distribution, to the
detriment of ”structural”
efforts.
The limitations imposed by the
government's economic policies
have hindered the necessary
investments in programmes that
would create employment and
promote structural solutions,
like agrarian reform and
sanitation projects, he argued.
With regard to agrarian reform,
the goal of providing land for
115,000 families in 2004 was not
fulfilled, and major spending
cuts mean that this year's
targets will probably not be met
either, said Valente.
Leftist President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva pledged to hand
over land to 400,000 families
during his current term
(2003-2006), but that promise
has been honoured by less than
one-third so far.
”We settled 85,000 families on
their own land in 2004, which
was 80 percent of the goal, and
that is perfectly reasonable,”
maintained Baccarin.
He added that the government is
striving to ensure ”quality” as
well as quantity, since land was
handed over in the past with no
provision for technical
assistance, credit, and other
conditions essential for the
farmers to earn a livelihood on
their new land.
The recent budget cuts have had
an impact on these efforts at
the beginning of the year, but
more resources could become
available further down the line,
he noted.
Settling 200,000 families
between 2005 and 2006 would take
care of all of the families
currently living in camps while
waiting to be allotted land,
thus solving a serious social
problem while increasing food
production, he added.
These families, along with
indigenous communities,
Brazilians of African descent
living in isolated settlements
known as ”quilombos”, and the
victims of natural disasters and
flooding provoked by the
building of dams are all
recipients of government food
hampers. A total of 709,000 were
distributed in 2004, and the
target for this year is 1.2
million.
The advances made in the family
agriculture programme -- a
”structural” initiative -- are
reflected in the granting of 6.5
billion reals (2.4 billion
dollars) in credits in 2004,
”triple the amount in 2002,”
Baccarin stressed.
This increase particularly
benefited northeastern Brazil,
the poorest region in this
country of over 182 million.
The results are visible in Piauí,
considered the poorest state in
Brazil. ”We have already
established 54 community farms
in 28 municipalities, and by the
end of 2006, a total of 4,000
families will be involved in the
project,” said Alvaro Ramos,
director of the family
agriculture unit at the Piauí
Rural Development Secretariat.
This is one of the projects in
which the local government is
primarily promoting the
involvement of families
currently receiving monthly
grants, helping them to become
self-sufficient so that the
grants can be provided to other
families in need, Ramos told IPS.
The two towns in Piauí where
Zero Hunger was launched in
early 2003, Acauán and Guaribas,
”are living a whole new reality
today,” he noted.
Guaribas, which had no
infrastructure of any kind, now
has a water supply system and an
outdoor market, which means that
its residents no longer have to
leave town to do their shopping.
A large number of people have
also been given literacy
training.
Zero Hunger also encompasses
such wide-ranging programmes as
the building of rainwater
catchment tanks and the
elimination of child labour by
providing families with
financial assistance so that
their children can stay in
school instead of working for a
living.
The rainwater reservoirs are
large tanks that can by easily
and cheaply built by the
beneficiaries themselves. Each
can hold up to 16,000 litres of
water for domestic consumption.
They have been a boon in the
semi-arid rural region of the
northeast, where many families
used to walk kilometres to
collect contaminated water.
”Around 75,000 catchment tanks
have been built so far, and this
year there is a budget for
building another 50,000,” said
Baccarin. Moreover, because
local governments and
non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) also provide funding for
this initiative, a total of
200,000 tanks could be
constructed by the end of this
year, he added.
The goal of the Semi-Arid Region
Coordinator (ASA), which groups
together some 800 NGOs, is the
construction of one million
reservoirs by 2008, to meet the
needs of all rural families in
need of this precious resource.
One of the targets established
as part of the Millennium
Development Goals, adopted by
the international community in
2000, is to provide sustainable
access to safe drinking water
for some 500 million people, or
one half of the people in the
world who are currently denied
this basic service.
But despite the advances made,
Zero Hunger faces a major
obstacle, namely a lack of the
political coordination needed to
most effectively implement its
various dimensions, according to
Valente, who was the only civil
society representative at the
U.N. Standing Community on
Nutrition (SCN) session held
last week in Brasilia.
Valente stressed, however, that
his criticisms are aimed at
improving the execution of the
Zero Hunger policy, an
initiative he applauds, unlike
”the opportunists who would like
to do away with the programme.”
There are some, for example, who
try to undermine the Zero Hunger
policy by claiming that it
confuses concepts like hunger,
malnutrition and poverty. While
it is important to clarify such
definitions, this particular
programme is perfectly justified
in terms of the wider concept of
nutritional security, Valente
and Baccarin concurred.
In Valente's opinion, the Lula
administration is doing the
right thing by seeking
international alliances that
will help Brazil to better
negotiate its foreign trade,
external debt and other
relations, in order to overcome
the current limitations on
social investments.
The public debt makes the
government ”a hostage to export
agribusiness, to the detriment
of social objectives,” he noted.
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