In food-rich Brazil, people go hungry as pandemic rages (Part II)

The pandemic is accentuating a trend seen in the last six years in Latin America’s largest economy, which is one of the world’s major food suppliers. In mid-2020, the director of the World Food Program’s Brazil office, Daniel Balaban, warned that Brazil was moving quickly toward returning to the world hunger map, which it left in 2014. Countries figure on that list when more than 5% of their population live in extreme poverty.

The World Bank said then that 5.4 million more Brazilians would fall into that category in 2020, for a total of 14.7 million. The total population is 212 million. "This is clearly the scariest moment we have been through in the fight against hunger,"said Rodrigo Afonso, director of an NGO called Accion Ciudadana.

Afonso said that when the organization was founded in 1993 to combat hunger, the problem was concentrated in the north and northeast of the sprawling country. "Today, anywhere you go you will find huge numbers of families that cannot feed themselves,"said Afonso, and "things are getting worse."

A poll in November by the Getulio Vargas Foundation found that nearly a third of those surveyed suffered from food insecurity. The government of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the pandemic, started paying a third of the population about 600 reals a month starting in April of last year. The aid was cut to 300 reals in October and eliminated in January. That money was a big help, but the neediest people in Brazil have now been without it for three months in an economy with the highest unemployment rate in nearly a decade – 13.5 percent as of the end of 2020 – steadily rising prices and the most devastating chapter yet of the pandemic.

From: shorturl.at/wJKRZ. Accessed on 04/17/2021