BRAZIL: A Witness to a Century of Incredible Growth and Change

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 15 2003 (IPS) - Angelina Dutra de Oliveira, at the age of 80, cannot get over the changes she has seen in her lifetime in Brazil.

Born in the rural town of Sao Domingos de Mariana, in the hinterland of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, she still remembers when horses and ox-drawn carts were the main means of transport. ”It took three hours on horseback to reach the train station when I was a little girl,” she told IPS.

”Everything has changed. Today we live in enormous, crowded cities polluted by cars,” said Dutra de Oliveira, a retired civil servant who divides her time between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil’s two largest cities, where her daughters live.

In the 20th century, three-quarters of which was witnessed by Dutra de Oliveira, Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 100 times, while the population grew tenfold, according to ”Statistics of the 20th Century”, a broad compilation of data put together by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Despite the stagnation suffered since 1981 – in economic terms, the last 20 years of the century were considered ”lost decades” – the Brazilian economy grew at an average of 4.5 percent a year during the 20th century.

The country’s economic growth was similar to that of South Korea, and far exceeded that of countries like Japan, China, Argentina, Chile and Mexico.

Local industry, the engine of growth, represented 11.6 percent of GDP in 1900, a proportion that had climbed to 34.3 percent by 1980. However, it dropped to 27.8 percent by 2000.

On the other hand, the accumulated inflation rate amounted to 1.1 trillion percent over the space of 100 years, which led to nine changes of the local currency, and aggravated the rich-poor gap, one of the widest in Latin America, the region with the most unequal distribution of income in the world.

In 1960, the income of the richest 10 percent of the population was 34 times that of the poorest 10 percent, and by 1990 it had grown to 60 times the income of the poorest 10 percent.

Economic growth without more equal income distribution ”deformed the country,” according to economist Celso Furtado.

The challenge of redistributing the national income and reducing inequality was left to the 21st century, said Planning Minister Guido Mantega and the president of the IBGE, Eduardo Nunes, at the recent presentation of the new report.

There have also been enormous changes in the size of the population. Latin America’s giant grew from 17.4 million inhabitants in 1900 to 169.6 million in 2000, making it the fifth-most populous country in the world, compared to 50 years ago, when it was the eighth.

The demographic explosion was accompanied by a massive rural exodus in the second half of the century. The number of people living in urban areas rose from 12.9 million in 1940 (31.2 percent of the population) to 138 million in 2000 (81.1 percent).

But the fast growth of the population is a thing of the past, as the birth rate has been drastically reduced in the past two decades, partly due to an unusually high proportion of women of child-bearing age who have undergone tubal ligation, or female sterilisation.

Illiteracy among Brazilians over 15 fell from 65 percent in 1920 to 13 percent in 2000; life expectancy rose from just 33.6 years at the start of the century to 68.6 years by the end; and infant mortality plunged from 162.4 per 1,000 live births to 29.6 per 1,000.

The Dutra family is an illustration of those changes. After leaving the rural town of Sao Domingos de Mariana, they moved to a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais.

Angelina’s mother, Maria Fontoura Dutra, born in 1900, had 14 children, four of whom died in their infancy.

Fontoura Dutra’s descendants, with the exception of two who were more prolific, had between two and four children, an average that dropped slightly in the following generation, which was barely affected by infant mortality.

The large Dutra family also exemplifies the expansion of the urban middle class since the mid-20th century. Most of Fontoura Dutra’s children and grandchildren graduated from the university.

It was the middle class, which expanded with industrialisation, that comprised the market that fuelled the national production of cars and home appliances like TV sets, refrigerators and, more recently, computers.

Angelina Dutra de Oliveira – her husband’s last name – became a civil servant in the nascent state social security system in 1944, at a time when relatively few women worked outside the home.

She was also a pioneer as a female labour and political activist, which led to her becoming one of the few grandmothers among the young people forced to go into exile in the 1970s for rebelling against the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

She is especially in awe of the technological changes that took place in Brazil, particularly in communications, over the past century. ”It took 15 days to receive a response in my job to a request typed on horrible typewriters, whereas today a response is immediate, thanks to computers,” she said.

The aspect that most frightens her is urban violence, and how widespread it has become in the past few decades, which she said reflects ”laxity in customs and respect for people, to the extent that it seems life is no longer worth anything.”

The country’s ”incredible” economic and technological progress has been accompanied by great social deterioration, she said. ”In my childhood, there was dignity in being poor, and people mobilised to help the needy when they had problems, but today there is degrading, generalised poverty.”