DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL: ‘Zero Hunger’ Sparks Debate

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 11 2002 (IPS) - Although clearly no one is opposed to the goal of the ”zero hunger” project announced as the most immediate priority of Brazil’s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the debate over how to best implement the programme is already raging.

After his landslide election in the Oct 27 runoff, Lula said that one of the first measures he would take upon entering office on Jan 1 would be to create a Social Emergency Secretariat, to make the fight against hunger the ”trademark” of his administration, with the goal of ensuring that all of Brazil’s 170 million people were eating three square meals a day by the end of his four-year term.

But critics say the method to be used in reaching that goal, the distribution of food stamps or electronic cards with which low-income families will be able to purchase food, will create a bureaucratic mechanism that could open the door to corruption.

Opponents of the plan say the food stamps could become a pseudo-currency parallel to the Brazilian real, as has already occurred in other cases.

Critics, both within and outside Lula’s leftist Workers’ Party (PT), argue that the announced formula will deprive the poor of the freedom to cover other pressing needs, like medicine, clothing or public transport, while assistance provided in cash would give them the flexibility to establish their own priorities.

”It should be the beneficiary who decides what to do with the aid,” and not the state, which is unfamiliar with the actual day-to-day needs of families, asserted the minister of Social Security, José Cechin.

Senator Eduardo Suplicy of the PT, who is the driving force behind the push for the right of all Brazilians to a minimum guaranteed income from cradle to grave, also argued that the assistance should be in the form of cash rather than food vouchers or stamps.

According to Rosa María Marques, an expert on social policy and consultant to the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), limiting the uses to which government aid can be put reflects a bias that the poor are incapable of setting clear priorities and deciding what they really need.

Other critics maintain that it is an exaggeration to say there are 44 million hungry people – one-quarter of the population – in Brazil.

There are also those who question the wisdom of creating another welfare programme instead of strengthening existing efforts, like school lunches, stipends for impoverished families who keep their children in school, and supplementary income plans.

But José Graziano, the chief architect of the ”zero hunger” project, has replied that the aim is to ensure food security, and not only assist the hungry. He also retorts that those who criticise the initiative have not read the entire programme or have not understood its scope.

Graziano points out that the plan entails 21 main areas of action, and combines structural policies, like land reform and an expansion of social security coverage to workers in the informal economy, with more specific, local measures, including the distribution of food stamps and an expansion of the school lunch programme.

However, the main target of the project is hunger rather than poverty overall, and that thrust orients the actions to be taken towards one of the main objectives, which is to stimulate food production in Brazil, Graziano explained.

The project is designed to induce the beneficiaries to spend the aid on food, fuelling the growth of an internal market for local agricultural output, which in turn will favour agrarian reform and family farms.

The ”zero hunger” project was inspired by a programme implemented in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s, based on food stamps for the poor, but with the chief aim of bolstering agricultural production. The Brazilian Forum for Food Security, an umbrella grouping of social movements and non-governmental organisations, praised the president-elect’s decision to adopt a public policy that will exclude no one in its aim to eradicate hunger in Latin America’s largest country.

”We applaud the decision to do it under the coordination of a secretariat that answers directly to the presidency,” economist Francisco Menezes, one of the coordinators of the Forum and the co-director of the non-governmental Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis, told IPS.

The original idea of creating a ministry would not be effective, as has already been demonstrated by previous initiatives to tackle similar problems, he said.

Menezes also praised the commitment to ensure the participation of civil society in running the programme, by reactivating the Food Security Council, which was dissolved by the government of outgoing President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

He played down the criticism of the methods to be used in the ”zero hunger” programme, underlining that ”in such a large, complex country, a single blanket policy would not work,” and a multifaceted approach is needed that can be adapted to local conditions.

It is right, for example, to set food security as the overall goal, but today there are emergency situations in some parts of Brazil, like drought in the impoverished northeast, that require immediate assistance in the form of food aid or vouchers – whichever is most feasible, he stressed.

Social participation and monitoring will also follow different formats, he added, based on municipal governments in some cases and on non-governmental organisations or mixed bodies in others.

Efforts already under way can continue, but will require complementary initiatives, as announced by Graziano, said Menezes, who pointed out that in many cases the school lunch programme provides students during the eight years of compulsory schooling with their only nutritious meal a day.

In Brazil’s pockets of poverty, vacations are a time of ”horror” for many children, because they can no longer count on getting one square meal a day, said the economist.

One possible measure that could remedy that problem, he added, is to extend the school lunch programme throughout the vacation period, and to children who fall outside the educational system because they are under seven or over 14.

DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL: ‘Zero Hunger’ Sparks Debate

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 11 2002 (IPS) - Although clearly no one is opposed to the goal of the “zero hunger” project announced as the most immediate priority of Brazil’s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the debate over how to best implement the programme is already raging.
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