BRAZIL: Social Safety Net Steadily Expanding

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 12 2004 (IPS) - Brazil has a new law that promises all Brazilians, as well as foreign nationals who have lived in the country for at least five years, an income sufficient to cover basic needs like food, education and health.

The new measure, which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed into law last Thursday, is to be cradle-to-grave and universal. The underlying concept is recognition of the right to life, independently of whether someone has a paying job.

But the law, approved 12 years after being introduced to Congress thanks to the persistence of its author, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, will go into effect gradually, starting in 2005. Suplicy hopes it will be fully in force by 2008 or 2010 at the latest.

Over the past few decades, the Brazilian state has been increasing welfare payments and non-monetary benefits to the poor, with the aim of reducing social inequalities – of which Brazil is a world champion – and alleviating extreme poverty and hunger.

Examples of those efforts are the school grant programme that makes a cash payment to low-income families who keep their children in primary school, a programme that provides a stipend for food, and one that gives families a small payment to buy cooking gas every two months.

The success of the school grant programme in Brasilia, the capital, over the past decade led the United Nations to recommend it as a best practice, and it has begun to be emulated in a number of countries in Latin America and around the world.

After President Lula took office in January 2003, his government set up the Zero Hunger plan, which includes cash assistance as well as ”structural” actions such as support for small farms, a literacy drive, and water tanks enabling families in arid parts of the country to collect rainwater from their rooftops.

In October, the government decided to unify four of the strategies, which up to then were implemented by different cabinet ministries, in the Family Grant Programme, which provides a minimum of 50 reais (17.40 dollars) per family, plus the school, food and cooking gas payments.

To be eligible for the assistance granted by the programme, as well as the other benefits that have not yet been unified under the Family Grant umbrella, families must make certain commitments, such as keeping their kids in school and their vaccinations up-to-date, and participating in adult literacy, nutritional education, and vocational training courses.

By the end of 2003, 3.6 million families had been transferred to the new programme, according to official statistics.

The various programmes cost around 1.5 billion dollars to run in 2003, and the total cost is expected to increase by 23 percent this year, representing a major transfer of money to the poorest populations and areas of Brazil, Ana Fonseca, executive secretary of the Family Grant Programme, told IPS.

The consolidation of the array of programmes made it possible to increase the average monthly benefit for each participating family from 8.45 to 25.30 dollars, said Fonseca. A large part of the increase was made possible by the reduction in bureaucratic costs, red tape and banking expenses.

Arandir Andrade Maia, a 25-year-old peasant farmer, said he was pleased with the new programme, which increased his monthly benefits to 33 dollars since November, nearly double what he was previously receiving through the Zero Hunger plan. The equivalent of 5.20 dollars a month were added for each of his young children.

But ”It’s a pity that the improvement was not extended to many other poor people who need it,” he told IPS by telephone from Guaribas, a municipality in the northeastern state of Piauí, one of the poorest parts of Brazil, where the Zero Hunger plan was launched a year ago.

What is really needed is rain, to make it possible for people to find work in agriculture, and ”so I can plant beans and corn on the small bit of land that my family has,” because the drought has aggravated poverty in the area, said Maia.

The Family Grant Programme has benefited hundreds of families in Guaribas, but many complain because they were not included in the programme, Wagner Correia Alves, a local employee of the federal bank that distributes the payments to the families, commented to IPS.

Drawing up a nationwide registry of impoverished families, considered a necessary step towards improving social programmes, is one of the big challenges facing the government, said Fonseca.

Income level ”is not the only face of poverty,” she said, explaining that officials had begun to assess other aspects, like years of schooling, place of residence – rural or urban, and the size of the city or town – whether the family owns or rents, and access to utilities like electricity and piped water.

The aim of the Family Grant Programme is to reach 11.4 million families by 2006. That would be equivalent to 41.4 million people – average family size in Brazil is 3.6 members -, approximately the number of hungry people in this country of 175 million, according to the government.