RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic
stops with the word for hunger — fome — in
large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year,
beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in
flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.
اضافة اعلان
A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going
hungry.
The scenes, which have proliferated in the last months on Brazil’s
streets, are stark evidence that President
Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that he could
protect the country’s economy by resisting public health policies intended to
curb the virus has failed.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been
skeptical of the disease’s impact and scorned the guidance of health experts,
arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures
and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the
pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls but
also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.
The virus is ripping through the social fabric, setting wrenching
records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy,
killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at
all for more than six years.
Last year, emergency government cash payments helped put food on
the table for millions of Brazilians — but when the money was scaled back
sharply this year, with a debt crisis looming, many pantries were left bare.
About 19 million people have gone hungry over the past year —
nearly twice the 10 million who did so in 2018, the most recent year for which
figures were available, according to the Brazilian government and a study of
privation during the pandemic by a network of Brazilian researchers focused on
the issue.
And about 117 million people, or roughly 55 percent of the
country’s population, faced food insecurity, with uncertain access to enough
nutrition, in 2020 — a leap from the 85 million who did so two years previous,
the study showed.
“The way the government has handled the virus has deepened
poverty and inequality,” said Douglas Belchior, the founder of
UNEafro Brasil,
one of a handful of organizations that have banded together to raise money to
get food baskets to vulnerable communities. “Hunger is a serious and
intractable problem in Brazil.”
Luana de Souza, 32, was one of several mothers who lined up
outside an improvised food pantry on a recent afternoon hoping to score a sack
with beans, rice and cooking oil. Her husband had worked for a company that
organized events but lost his job last year — one of 8 million people who
joined Brazil’s unemployment rolls during the pandemic, driving the rate above
14 percent, according to Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics.
At first the family managed by spending their government
assistance carefully, she said, but this year, once the payments were cut, they
struggled.
“There is no work,” she said. “And the bills keep coming.”
Brazil’s economy had gone into recession in 2014 and had not
recovered when the pandemic hit. Bolsonaro often invoked the reality of
families like de Souza’s, who cannot afford to stay home without working, to
argue that the type of lockdowns governments in Europe and other wealthy
nations ordered to curb the spread of the virus were untenable in Brazil.
Last year, as governors and mayors around Brazil signed decrees
shutting down nonessential businesses and restricting mobility, Bolsonaro
called those measures “extreme” and warned that they would result in
malnutrition.
The president also dismissed the threat of the virus, sowed
doubts about vaccines, which his government has been slow to procure, and often
encouraged crowds of supporters at political events.
As a second wave of cases this year led to the collapse of the
health care system in several cities, local officials again imposed a raft of
strict measures — and found themselves at war with Bolsonaro.
“People have to have freedom, the right to work,” he said last
month, calling the new quarantine measures imposed by local governments
tantamount to living in a “dictatorship.”
Early this month, as the daily death toll from the virus
sometimes surpassed 4,000, Bolsonaro acknowledged the severity of the
humanitarian crisis facing his country. But he took no responsibility and
instead faulted local officials.
“Brazil is at the limit,” he said, arguing that the blame lay
with “whoever closed everything.”
But economists said that the argument that restrictions intended
to control the virus would worsen Brazil’s economic downturn was “a false
dilemma.”
In an open letter addressed to Brazilian authorities in late
March, more than 1,500 economists and businesspeople asked the government to
impose stricter measures, including lockdown.
“It is not reasonable to expect economic activity to recover
from an uncontrolled epidemic,” the experts wrote.
Bolsonaro’s approach had a broadly destabilizing effect, said
Thomas Conti, lecturer at Insper, a business school.
“The Brazilian real was the most devalued currency among all
developing countries,” Conti said. “We are at an alarming level of
unemployment, there is no predictability to the future of the country, budget
rules are being violated, and inflation grows nonstop.”
The country’s worsening COVID-19 crisis has left Bolsonaro
politically vulnerable. The Senate this month began an inquiry into the
government’s handling of the pandemic. The study is expected to document
missteps, including the government’s endorsement of drugs that are ineffective
to treat COVID-19 and shortages of basic medical supplies, including oxygen.
Some of those missteps are likely to be blamed for preventable deaths.
Advocacy and human rights organizations earlier this year
started a campaign called Tem Gente Com Fome, or People are Going Hungry, with
the aim of raising money from companies and individuals to get food baskets to
needy people across the country.
Belchior, one of the founders, said the campaign is named after
a poem by writer and artist Solano Trindade. It describes scenes of misery
viewed as a train in Rio de Janeiro makes its way across poor neighborhoods
where the state has been all but absent for decades.
“Families are increasingly pleading for earlier food deliveries,”
Belchior said. “And they’re depending more on community actions than the
government.”
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