BRAZIL: Critics Doubt Population Is 81 Percent Urban

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 15 2002 (IPS) - The 2000 census in Brazil indicates that a full 81.2 percent of the population lives in urban areas. But critics say that figure amounts to a statistical distortion that could undermine the country’s rural development policies.

The secretary of the governmental National Council on Sustainable Rural Development (CNDRS), José Eli da Veiga, asserts that at least 30 percent of Brazil’s 170 million people live in municipalities with purely rural economies, which are based on the use of natural resources.

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) counts as urban the inhabitants of the seats of municipal governments, as well as areas that are defined as urban by local laws.

But according to Veiga, that criteria is based on a 1938 presidential decree that has been made obsolete by reality and which is “mistaken in terms of the policies used to define the country’s territory,” said Veiga.

Official census data thus indicates that the urban population grew from 44.67 percent in 1960 to 81.2 percent in 2000. In line with that apparent trend, the rural population would no longer exist in 2030 – an absurd proposition, said the secretary of the CNDRS, who is also a professor of agricultural economy at the University of Sao Paulo.

The estimate of Brazil’s urban population is indeed high, even higher than that of more industrialised countries that lack Brazil’s vast sparsely populated areas like the Amazon jungle.

In France, for example, 75 percent of the population lives in urban areas, a proportion that averages 76.7 percent in the European Union, according to 1998 statistics.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) counts as urban those municipalities or districts that have a population density higher than 150 inhabitants per square kilometre.

If that guideline were followed in Brazil, only 411 of Brazil’s 5,561 municipalities would in effect be considered urban, and the rural population, reported at 18.8 percent (32 million people) in the official census, would increase to 43 percent (73 million people), said Veiga.

At least 80 percent of Brazil’s municipalities should actually be classified as rural, since very few have a population density of even 40 people per square kilometre, he argued.

Underestimating the size of the rural population obscures that sector’s weight in society and renders useless policies addressing the needs of a demographic group that according to the census is on its way to disappearing, he complained.

The CNDRS, which answers to the Ministry of Agrarian Development, has been entrusted with the mission of designing a rural development strategy this year.

To undertake that task, Veiga has opened up to public debate a project that would defend the family farm, and in particular the diversification of local economies, in accordance with a global trend in which rural activities are becoming more and more varied, thus reducing the relative importance of income from farming.

But María Helena Palmer Lima, the head of the IBGE Department of Geography, maintained that Veiga’s criticism of the guidelines used in defining urban and rural was merely “a confusion of names.”

Palmer Lima told IPS that the national censuses, which are carried out every 10 years, have counted the residents of all villages, towns and cities as urban since 1940.

Urban boundaries are generally defined by the local laws of the municipalities, which classify inhabitants as either rural or urban.

Veiga, however, proposes redefining municipalities with low population density as rural. Other proposals include one that would classify inhabitants based on the size of the economically active population, explained Palmer Lima.

“The issue has become controversial,” and will be discussed at a seminar that the IBGE will hold in late June, she said.

The question is also of interest to tax authorities and municipal governments, which means the need for changes must be evaluated, Palmer Lima added.

The question of taxes has given rise to distortions, due to the fact that municipalities define their own boundaries.

Municipal governments often overextend the boundaries of their urban areas because property owners within those limits pay local municipal taxes, while the tax on rural property is collected by the national government, critics point out.

But in many cases the census corrects that distortion, by defining populations “of urban areas with rural characteristics and vice versa,” said Palmer Lima in response to the criticism raised by Veiga.

She explained that there is also a distortion according to which clearly urban areas are classified as rural zones due mainly to political reasons, with the aim of benefiting local inhabitants with lower taxes.

Palmer Lima, a geographer, said the official statistics, although presented in a format that is questioned by some, are sufficiently broken down to enable their reorganisation in such a way as to provide valid data for researchers and officials to use.

For example, Veiga was able to rearrange the IBGE’s own statistics on the urban/rural distribution of the Brazilian population to begin to draw up his agency’s rural development plan.

Palmer Lima did concede that the high urban population estimate could present an erroneous image, by diminishing the real importance of farming and the country’s rural economy.