In the 21st century, Brazil had surprised the world with a robust political agenda to confront one of the worst expressions of inequality: Hunger. However, during this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of hunger and food security once again dominated the Brazilian public debate as research data was released that attested to what many social movements had already been denouncing: That hunger was once again haunting millions of households in the country.

Food insecurity designates a reduction, concern, or uncertainty about regular and permanent access to food in adequate quantity and quality. According to a survey conducted by the Research Group Food for Justice: Power, Politics and Food Inequalities in a Bioeconomy of the Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with scholars from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the Universidade de Brasília (UnB), 59.4 percent of the households in Brazil were food insecure from August to December 2020. Of this total, 15 percent of Brazilian households suffered from hunger. The Food for Justice data showed a significant deterioration in food security that had already worsened a few years prior to the onset of the pandemic. According to the data from the 2017-2018 Family Budget Survey (Pesquisa de Orçamento Familiar; POF), conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística; IBGE), food insecurity in the country had increased from 22.6 percent in 2013 to 36.4 percent in 2017–2018.

However, food insecurity does not affect all social groups equally. Urban households with a white male head, a monthly per capita income above 1,000 reais, located in an urban area or in the Center-West, South, or Southeast regions are less likely to be food insecure. On the other hand, households where the head of the household is a brown (pardo) or black (preto) woman, with a per capita monthly income less than 1,000 reais, located in a rural area or in the North or Northeast regions are most likely to be food insecure. This is a portrait of Brazilian inequalities expressed in food.

15 percent of Brazilian households suffered from hunger. The Food for Justice data showed a significant deterioration in food security that had already worsened a few years prior to the onset of the pandemic.

Regarding data on food consumption, even before the pandemic, households in situations of food insecurity already consumed healthy foods—such as meat (72.6 percent), vegetables (67.2 percent), and fruits (66.5 percent)—on an irregular basis (less than five times a week). This situation worsened after the pandemic, when there was a significant reduction in the consumption of important foods, such as the meat group, which decreased amongst 44.4 percent of the interviewed households. This percentage is much higher amongst households in situations of food insecurity. Such households suffered a reduction of more than 85 percent in their consumption of healthy foods.

How did a country that left the UN Hunger Map in 2014 return to a situation of critical food insecurity in 2020? There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, the difficulty and restriction of access to food is related to decreased incomes; the main determinant of food insecurity. In the last five years, Brazil has experienced an economic crisis, with increased unemployment, devaluation of the minimum wage, and rising inflation, all of which impact food prices. The COVID-19 pandemic has only aggravated the situation.

Secondly, as of 2016, the political agenda, which had prioritized the fight against hunger in the previous decade, has since focused on extreme austerity. It is essential to highlight that while Brazil has received international acclaim for the success of the Brazilian cash transfer programme (Bolsa Família) in combating extreme poverty, a process of structural change had been benefiting a much more significant portion of the population due to the increase in formal employment and income. This cycle was interrupted with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. However, her administration had already showed signs of austerity as a reaction to the economic crisis beginning at that time. From a continued policy of real appreciation of the minimum wage—that is, a consistent increase in workers’ income above inflation—and expansion of the national social security system—whose benefits are tied to the value of the minimum wage—public policy now consists in relaxing labour rights, reducing public spending for social policies, and decreasing the purchasing power of the minimum wage. In December 2016, a new constitutional amendment instituted a new fiscal regime for the following 20 years. It created a limitation on public spending and investment until 2036, especially on those of a social nature.

In the last five years, Brazil has experienced an economic crisis, with increased unemployment, devaluation of the minimum wage, and rising inflation, all of which impact food prices. The COVID-19 pandemic has only aggravated the situation.

Finally, in terms of food production and distribution, a series of changes were begun in 2016, which saw public policies for the promotion family farming dismantled, the Ministry of Agrarian Development (2016) disbanded, and essential policies such as the Food Purchase Programme scrapped (Programa Nacional de Aquisição de Alimentos; PAA). Moreover, in the context of the pandemic, essential programmes guaranteeing the Human Right to Adequate Food, such as the National School Feeding Programme (Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar; PNAE), have been partially defunded. This has significantly affected the principle of universality in serving the population. In 2019, the national government closed many channels for dialogue with organized civil society and chose to ignore the accumulation of decades of learning in the promotion of the right to food. It disbanded the National Food and Nutrition Security Council (Conselho Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional; CONSEA), a space for social participation that brought together representatives of civil society and the state to dialogue on food and nutrition security policies.

Steps to be adopted
To recover the country’s food security indicators, income redistribution policies will need to be resumed, alongside social protection policies, specific support for family and peasant agriculture, and food and nutritional security policies. Food insecurity has been successfully tackled in the past and such previous action must serve as a guide to confront this problem once again. However, updates and innovations that respond to the challenges of the new context are required. For this, it is essential to engage in the same dialogue with organized civil society that was fundamental in the past for the creation of public policies on food security and nutrition. In the context of the pandemic, such dialogue has been essential in carrying out actions of solidarity and making denunciations with a view to confronting hunger.

The views expressed above belong to the author(s).

Source: https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/hunger-returns-to-brazil/

The post Hunger returns to Brazil first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Many people blame the Brazilian government and its pro-agriculture policies for the current crisis. But as an environmental researcher who has worked in the Amazon for the past 25 years, I can say the seeds were planted before the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. And the prospects of slowing deforestation remain dim, an issue that matters to people around the world.

That’s in part because the current administration has only aggravated the situation with its anti-environmental agenda. Unless the Brazilian people succeed in making Bolsonaro retreat from his stated goal of developing the Amazon, deforestation will surge again. Adding fuel to the fire is the quickening pace of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA,) a multi-nation plan to build road, dams and rail lines across the Amazon.

Conflicting objectives

Brazil managed to significantly reduce deforestation rates at the turn of the millennium with effective environmental policy and voluntary efforts by the private sector. Deforestation, which started in the 1970s, began climbing again in 2015 due to political turmoil and an economic recession that paved the way to policy reversals.

The Amazonian deforestation rate dropped from about 10,700 square miles in 2004 to 1,765 square miles in 2012 and remained low until its resurgence a few years ago. This was because of effective environmental policy, which in Brazil is mostly based on protected areas, such as national parks, and a forestry code limiting the amount of land that can be cleared on individual properties.

Over the years, the Brazilian government has developed a system of protected areas for ecological protection and indigenous reserves. In 2002 it expanded their coverage to about 43 percent of the entire Amazon. It also created protected areas in zones of land conflict as a means to tamp down rampant fire and deforestation.

Adding to this, enforcement of the forestry code was enhanced by the development of a satellite monitoring system that enabled Brazil’s environmental protection agency to identify law-breaking property owners from space. In addition to the government, the private sector helped lower the rate of deforestation. Soybean farmers stopped planting new fields in the forest, and retailers demanded that the goods they sold come from lands already cleared so they could certify them as “green,” especially beef.

Unfortunately, these efforts began to unravel almost as soon as they proved themselves effective. The background reason is that many people have long viewed the Amazon as a vast store of valuable resources to be used for the economic development of a poor region. The agenda of IIRSA—an extensive infrastructure building-project launched in 2000 to link the region’s economies and remote areas—expresses this view, common to all nations that share the Amazon Basin. These include, in addition to Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. It should come as no surprise that their individual orientations to the region all reflect a contradiction between economic development on the one hand and conservation on the other.

In Brazil, the government not only creates protected areas, it downsizes them in order to prepare for infrastructure projects. Former President Dilma Rousseff even downsized Amazon National Park in 2012, the first in the Amazon, to make way for the Tapajós Hydroelectric Complex, a key component of the IIRSA plan. The government does not act in a vacuum, and in Brazil, a powerful congressional bloc, the rural/mining caucus known as the Ruralistas, works tirelessly at undermining environmental policy.

This has led to revisions in the forestry code, in 2012, that favor agriculture, not the environment, by exempting those who illegally deforested before 2008 from having to reforest in accordance with the law. Continuing Ruralista political action made it easier in 2017 for land grabbers to obtain title to illegally seized lands.

Fears of a tipping point

President Bolsonaro has inherited a set of weakened environmental policies and all indications are that he will continue to weaken them. At the same time, he has acted on his promise to open the Amazon to development by announcing plans to build a bridge across the Amazon River and to extend a paved road all the way to the border with Suriname. The IIRSA agenda appears to be accelerating, and as people flock to the region to take advantage of the jobs it creates, the fires can only get worse.

Since the opening of the Amazon to development in the 1970s, fires have been deliberately set on a yearly basis to make way for fields and pastures and to fertilize soils. The Amazon maintains a moist climate, which limits their extent. Thus, super fires have never raged over hundreds of square miles as happens with wildfires in the U.S. But this could change due to the cumulative effect of the repeated use of fire.

Research shows that every year when the forest burns, the destructive effect spreads beyond the flames to kill trees and desiccate the landscape. This can make the forest ever more vulnerable to fire through the buildup of flammable materials and the coalescence of fire-scarred ecosystems across broad swaths of the entire basin.

If Brazil does not retreat from the course it is on, scientists warn there will come a time in the near future when Amazonian fires burn without control and push the forest to a point of no return, what some have called a “tipping point” that will permanently change the underlying ecosystem. Without a restoration of environmental policy in Brazil, the worst fires are yet to come.

Robert T. Walker is a Professor of Latin American Studies and Geography at the University of Florida

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-rainforest-fires-scientists-says-1458340

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