DEVELOPMENT: Civil Society Fights Hunger in Brazil

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 1 2002 (IPS) - Hunger is still a problem for a portion of Brazil’s population, despite the substantial growth of agricultural output and a mushrooming of poverty-alleviation programmes run by civil society, several of which have provided impressive results.

Even though the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso says the country has enough food to meet domestic demand, according to official statistics, 13 percent of Brazil’s nearly 170 million people live in the most abject poverty, unable to cover their minimal dietary needs.

However, the organisations grouped in the non-governmental Brazilian Forum on Food Security estimate that if the statistics take into account the poor who must dedicate part of their tiny incomes to meeting other basic needs, over 40 million Brazilians have trouble putting food on their tables.

Nevertheless, the mobilisation of civil society over the past two decades has alleviated hunger or its effects through exemplary initiatives that have taken varied approaches.

One outstanding example is the Pastoral for Children, a Catholic Church group that the Brazilian government nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of the scope and success of its work, the original focus of which was reducing infant mortality.

The Pastoral for Children is active in 64 percent of Brazil’s 5,560 municipalities, and especially the country’s slums, with some 153,000 volunteers who assist nearly 1.7 million children under six every month.

The Pastoral’s coordinator of public policy, Clovis Boufleur, told IPS that the church group is “the world’s biggest community- based volunteer organisation focusing on actions to boost basic health.”

Although the communities where the organisation is active are the country’s poorest, they had an infant mortality rate of just 13 per 1,000 live births last year.

In comparison, the latest national statistic on infant mortality provided by the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF) reported a rate of 34.6 per 1,000 live births in 1999.

The success of the Pastoral’s work is based on its efforts to orient pregnant women and mothers, encourage breastfeeding, fight respiratory infections and diarrhea, increase immunisations of newborns, and foment the use of effective home remedies.

In its 19 years of activity, the group has also focused on helping the poor boost their incomes, through plans that address local realities and demands, adult literacy drives, assistance for the elderly, and informational programmes over a network of 1,343 radio stations.

One of the group’s innovations is the “multi-mixture” – flour fortified with ingredients rich in protein and vitamins, which makes use of generally overlooked food sources, and is designed to enrich the usually poor diet of low-income sectors.

Use of the multi-mixture has spread around the country, helping to fight malnutrition.

But food security requires actions complementary to the initiatives of civil society that are aimed at securing respect for the right to an adequate diet, said Clovis Boufleur.

The government must also play its fundamental role of promoting and implementing policies that ensure adequate production of food, as well as access to food by the entire population, he underlined.

That would require an accelerated programme of redistribution of land and access to loans for small family farms, whose output goes to the local market, rather than to export like the production of large landholdings and agribusiness interests, Boufleur maintained.

Also needed are consumer protection laws and measures to guarantee quality food for all, he added.

But international factors like the foreign debt and unfavourable terms of trade also fuel hunger in Brazil, and in other poor countries as well, he stressed.

Boufleur argued that a partnership and joint actions between the government and civil society are indispensable to fighting hunger. Intersectoral forums linking government institutions, universities, NGOs and other civil society groups are a necessary instrument, he said.

Towards that end, some states in Brazil have already set up active Councils on Food Security, Boufleur noted.

Brazilians have become more aware of the extent of the problem and the need to combat it thanks to another non-governmental initiative, Citizen Action against Hunger and Poverty and for Life, launched in 1993 by sociologist Herbert de Souza, a charismatic social leader who died in 1997.

The alert sounded by Souza helped mobilise millions of people and companies to organise in small groups throughout the country and begin collecting food, which was distributed among the poorest of the poor.

Although the movement shrank somewhat in later years, it has survived in the “Christmas Without Hunger” campaigns. Late last year, food baskets were delivered to around 400,000 families.

Government studies have found a sharp decline in the number of hungry and malnourished people in recent years, due to the taming of inflation, civil society initiatives, and several successful government programmes as well.

For example, the Cardoso administration provides “scholarships” or stipends to poor families who keep their children in school, as well as free school lunches 200 days a year for 37 million public school students through the eighth grade.

But the school lunch programme only covers children aged seven to 14, leaving out the roughly 16 million children below the age of six, criticised Boufleur.

Francisco Menezes, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Research, attributed the progress made in lowering the infant mortality rate and reducing malnutrition in Brazil to improved economic performance and government policies, as well as a better-informed population and the action of civil society groups and volunteer organisations.