Poverty of Brazil

Not long ago hailed for its exemplary efforts to reduce hunger, Brazil is seeing a marked deterioration in its food security indicators as the economic fallout of COVID-19 deepens and a growing number of people struggle to afford a nutritional diet amid government aid cuts.

Considered an upper middle income country, Brazil was removed in 2014 from the World Food Programme’s Hunger Map after a decade of progress in reducing hunger. But less than seven years later, more than half its 212 million population is grappling with some level of food insecurity – and almost one in 10 with serious hunger.

“With more than 19 million people facing serious food insecurity, the ‘yellow [warning] light’ has been turned on,” Daniel Balaban – director of the Center of Excellence against Hunger, and the WFP’s representative in Brazil – told The New Humanitarian. 

To be placed on the WFP’s Hunger Map, a country must have at least five percent of its population facing serious food insecurity. With nine percent of Brazil’s population now in that category, “we can say that the country is effectively back on the map”, said Balaban. Because Brazil's IBGE census bureau hasn’t officially released the latest data – there is no scheduled date for that release – the map can’t yet be updated to reflect this, he explained.

For Eliana Macedo, the economic effects of the pandemic struck when the families whose houses she cleaned suspended her services, afraid of letting outsiders into their homes.

After receiving four months of emergency financial aid from the government in 2020, the 44-year-old single mother of two – who lives in a poor community in Salvador, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia – now gets by on charity food aid.

“Hunger is blind; it's ugly, and it hurts,” she told The New Humanitarian. “You wake up in the morning, look for a piece of bread to give to your child, and you don’t have any. It’s already noon and he's crying from hunger, and you don't have anything to give him. It's very bad.”

 

_{Source & credit: new humanitarian}

^{Photo by william f. santos on Unsplash}