POVERTY: Brazil's new plan to beat poverty

By Taylor Barnes, Correspondent, Sara Llana Miller, Staff writer / July 7, 2011

Brazil just launched a new, multibillion-dollar program to aid the 16 million Brazilians still living in extreme poverty. The program is the latest in an effort across Latin America to stamp out poverty.

 Clemilda dos Santos has 11 children. She will receive additional help under Brazil’s new social programs. Taylor Barnes
With a monthly stipend that she receives from the Brazilian government, Clemilda dos Santos can now keep the refrigerator stocked for her 10 kids, but life for the family is still precarious. At the top of a red clay hill in Japeri, the town with the lowest human development index in the state of Rio, the one-bedroom home she shares with her whole family still floods with rainwater. Her kids need winter coats.


 Marilsa Martins, the mother of seven, holds her grandson. Helping women like Martins is key to the new Brazil, say officials. Taylor Barnes

Latin America's middle class grows, but with a tenuous grasp on status Rising global food prices squeeze the world's poor Want to slash poverty? Look to Latin America. Topics
Poverty Economic Issues Business Economies Latin American Economy In the past decade, Brazil has been touted for lifting 25 million people out of poverty, thanks to macroeconomic stability, high commodities prices, and a much hailed social program called Bolsa Familia that gives families monthly cash for families that adhere to conditions such as keeping kids in classrooms. But as the nation continues to rise – it became majority middle class in 2008, according to the Rio-based Getúlio Vargas Foundation – leaders say they are determined to do more, arguing that packed homes and uncloaked children have no place in today’s economic landscape.
Now Brazil has launched another multibillion-dollar antipoverty plan, called Brazil Without Misery, to reach the remaining 16 million Brazilians still living in extreme poverty. Expanding upon Bolsa Familia, it will increase cash transfers, improve public services, and create new job opportunities for the poor. Brazil’s new President Dilma Rousseff, who took office in January, says her aim is to eliminate extreme poverty within four years.
“A country that has grown like Brazil can’t be content with just having a big social program like Bolsa Familia,” Social Development Minister Tereza Campello said upon the launch of the new program last month.

Regional goals
That sentiment reflects rhetoric across the region. Over the past decade, the poor have been buoyed across Latin America, as nations have enjoyed sustained GDP growth and created targeted social programs like conditional cash transfers. But now goals have been set beyond poverty reduction. In the world’s most unequal region, presidents from Sebastian Piñera in Chile to Felipe Calderon in Mexico are pledging to eradicate extreme poverty altogether.
“There is a sense that with Latin America growing at very high growth rates in the last decade or so, this is an opportunity to have a new social contract with people in the region,” says Norbert Schady, senior economic adviser for social sectors at the Inter-American Development Bank.
The region’s GDP grew by an average of 2.6 percent between 2000 and 2008, according to the World Bank. Extreme poverty has gone down from 19.4 percent in 2002 to 12.9 last year, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). And 56 million households have joined the middle class in Latin America in the past decade and a half, according to a recent ECLAC analysis.

Bigger checks, better lives
Conditional cash transfer programs, like the one Ms. dos Santos receives in Brazil, have played an immediate role in poverty reduction. Spearheaded in Mexico and Brazil, the programs have been extended to virtually every country in Latin America today.
They have transformed towns like Japeri, more than an hour ride on a quivering and rusty train from the city of Rio de Janeiro. The town ranks at the bottom of the state’s human development index, and mothers have long struggled to feed their kids or care for their sick babies. But today some 9,500 families in this town of 95,000 receive the Bolsa Familia stipends.


In Chile, President Piñera has promised to overcome extreme poverty. So has Mr. Calderon in Mexico, where Oportunidades, the nation’s conditional cash program, has helped millions of Mexicans. In most countries, leaders have promised to expand upon social programs to help the poor.
Politicians are responding, in part, to demands from voters. A case and point is the recent Peruvian elections, where left-leaning Ollanta Humala won the race with support from disenfranchised Peruvians who have been left behind, despite Peru's economy being the fastest-growing in Latin America. He says he wants to expand his nation's conditional cash program called Juntos, meaning "together" in Spanish.
In the beginning of the decade, candidates across the nation railed against inequality. The rhetoric came strongest from the left, led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has diverted billions into social programs for the poor. But it has evolved into a promise by the entire political spectrum: support for the poor while maintaining macroeconomic stability, the kind of governance hailed in Brazil and which Mr. Ollanta sought to model himself after.

Social programs have their critics
Some critics claim that the social programs of today are not long-term answers to achieving equality. They require that today's generation of children attend school, but the quality of the education is questionable in the most marginalized areas where social programs are concentrated.
But Brazilian economist Tiago Berriel of the Rio-based Getúlio Vargas Foundation argues that even so, the social programs provide a valuable safety net.
"The degree of poverty we're talking about is people who aren't able to eat," says Mr. Berriel. "So with the country getting richer, it is probable that we are able to eliminate extreme poverty and still have a very high level of inequality [between the rich and poor]."
Christopher Sabatini, editor-in-chief of the policy journal Americas Quarterly in New York, which is published by the Council of the Americas, says that as nations get richer, they need to start improving the quality of social services – such as health-care insurance or pensions – overall, and not just targeted, cash-based programs that are individualistic.
“People are still in very fragile socioeconomic positions,” he says. “There needs to be a more broad-based social safety net.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2011/0707/Brazil-s-new-plan-to-beat-poverty

POVERTY: Brazil: World Bank loaning Brazil $6B to support social programs, especially poverty eradication

Associated Press, June 1 2011

BRASILIA, Brazil — The head of the World Bank says the institution is loaning Brazil up to $6 billion over the next year to support social programs.
Robert Zoellick, president of the Bank, says Wednesday the money will go toward Brazilian government programs to promote education, infrastructure risk management and most importantly toward poverty.
Brazil President Dilma Rousseff has made eradicating extreme poverty in Brazil the cornerstone of her social programs. Details on her poverty program are expected to be released Thursday.
Brazil’s government says 16 million people live in extreme poverty in the nation, surviving on $45 a month.
Zoellick says the World Bank promise of loans up to $6 billion is double what the Bank has provided to Brazil on average in the past.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/world-bank-loaning-brazil-6b-to-support-social-programs-especially-poverty-eradication/2011/06/01/AGJd8hGH_story.html

POVERTY: Brazil launches drive to lift 16 mln from poverty

Writing by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Cynthia Osterman : Jun 1 2011
BRASILIA, June 2 (Reuters) - President Dilma Rousseff launched an ambitious plan on Thursday to eliminate dire poverty in Brazil within four years by lifting more than 16 million people from conditions of "misery."
The "Brazil Without Misery" program is the signature policy of the former leftist guerrilla's first term, her advisers said, fulfilling one of the key promises she made in her campaign for the presidency last year.
Poorer voters, millions of whom benefited from rapid economic growth and an expanded anti-poverty program under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are the main electoral base for Rousseff's center-left Workers' Party.
The announcement of the new program in the capital Brasilia was a welcome relief for Rousseff following weeks of negative media coverage over a scandal that has tainted her chief of staff and exposed differences with her main coalition ally, the PMDB party.
The success of the Bolsa Familia family stipend program under Lula, which helped lift about 20 million people into a thriving lower middle class, showed that cutting poverty was a crucial part of Brazil's economic success, Rousseff said at a ceremony in the capital.
"Brazil proved to the world that the best way to grow is distributing wealth," she said, flanked by her troubled chief of staff Antonio Palocci and Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB in an apparent show of unity.
Despite the strides Brazil has made in recent years, with brisk growth rates that have pushed it up the ranks of the world's largest economies, it still faced a "crisis" of poverty that was more serious than any financial crisis, she said.
"We can't forget that the most permanent, challenging and harrowing crisis is having chronic poverty in this country."

MULTI-PRONGED APPROACH
The new program aims to raise 16.2 million people above the level of extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than 70 reais ($44) per month, through a multi-pronged approach of expanded financial aid, improved education, access to water and energy, as well as job training.
The Bolsa Familia program, which gives a monthly stipend to families based on their children's school attendance, will be expanded to another 800,000 families, officials said. The program, which has been praised by the World Bank and copied by other developing countries, already reaches more than a quarter of Brazil's 190 million population.
Officials say poor families will also be provided with education and job training under the program, noting that 40 percent of those in extreme poverty are under the age of 14.
Families will be able to claim Bolsa Familia payments for 5 children, up from 3 now, resulting in another 1.3 million children included in the program.
The new anti-poverty drive will also quadruple the number of poor rural farmers who benefit from government food purchases and payments of up to 2,400 reais every six months to improve their productivity.
A separate Bolsa Verde (Green Stipend) program will hand out 300 reais every three months to families who help to preserve forests where they live.
"It is the state arriving where the poverty is, not the poor having to seek help," said Tereza Campello, the social development minister.
"It's a challenge implementing the policies."
Officials did not say how much the new program would cost.
The Bolsa Familia program has been widely praised for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. While critics say it creates dependency on state handouts, the program stands in stark contrast to previous attempts in Brazil to reduce hunger that were bogged down by food distribution problems and theft.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/brazil-poverty-idUSN0225114420110602

POVERTY: Fast-growing Brazil tries to lift its poorest

Felipe Dana/ AP - Brazil’s economy is growing fast but more than 16 million Brazilians still live in extreme poverty. In the photo, a boy eats a piece of bread as he sits in the doorway of his home in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 15, 2011.

 Juan Forero, May 11 2011

IPOJUCA, Brazil — The industrial complex and port here are a showcase of the region’s economic might, employing 55,000 workers and attracting billions in investments. But a couple of miles down the road, Netildes Delvina Soares, 47, lives “with much suffering,” as she put it, in a wood-plank hut without plumbing or electricity.
Although traditionally poor, Brazil’s northeast is now home to the country’s fastest-growing regional economy, making the disparity between prosperity and extreme poverty more visible here than anywhere else. And it is places such as this that the country’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, is hoping to uplift as she pursues an ambitious goal: eradicating indigence, defined as earning less than $45 a month.

 (Juan Forero/ TWP ) - Netildes Delvina Soares, 47, lives with much suffering, as she put it, in a wood-plank hut without plumbing or electricity. Her sister (right), Mara Maria da Silva, 58, worries about the abject poverty for the children in the community.

Over the past decade, Brazil has lifted 20 million people out of poverty through a mix of well-funded social programs and careful economic stewardship, creating a burgeoning consumer class that has helped make the country the world’s seventh-largest economy.
Now, what Rousseff called her administration’s “most obstinate fight” will be to eradicate extreme poverty, which affects more than 16 million Brazilians, by 2014. “There is still poverty that shames our country and prevents our full affirmation as a developed people,” Rousseff, 63, said at her Jan. 1 inauguration, as she succeeded her mentor, the popular Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Government officials say that in the coming weeks Rousseff will lay out details of a broad initiative, “Brazil Without Poverty,” which will expand health, education and cash-transfer programs and direct increased development aid to poverty-stricken regions.
“These are strategic decisions for redistributing wealth, promoting big works in regions where poverty was concentrated,” Tereza Campello, minister of social development, said in an interview.
The bulk of the assistance will be funneled to the vast north, much of it Amazonia, and the densely populated northeast, regions that are home to 75 percent of the Brazilians who fall below the extreme-poverty line.
It is in the northeast that poverty’s reach has been most extensive and intractable, which historians attribute to arid conditions and the legacy of slavery. The nine northeastern states contain 27 percent of Brazil’s about 200 million people but account for 13 percent of its economic growth, said Paulo Guimaraes, regional chief of BNDES, Brazil’s development bank. In contrast, the southeast, rich in industry, churns out 56 percent of the country’s economic output with just 41 percent of the population.
Guimaraes said the poverty is also deeply entrenched, stretching from isolated peasant hamlets in the interior to the slums of the region’s bustling cities.
“Some people here don’t even have an ID card,” Guimaraes said. “They are invisible.”
Mara Maria da Silva, 58, is among the poorest, living in a squatter community. Her home is a shack on a hillside in Cabo de Santo Agostinho, sandwiched between the vast Suape port and industrial park and Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state. She laments her predicament but worries most about children growing up in abject poverty, using drugs and sleeping in the open air.
“Here, it is full of poverty,” she said. “We need many things. Pernambuco is very ignored.”

Jorge Jatoba, an economist who studies poverty, said that a confluence of violence, malnutrition and lack of services, such as potable water, has made poverty especially difficult to uproot in the northeast, despite the region’s China-like growth, 9.3 percent last year. Illiteracy hovers around 20 percent, he said, and only about half of those between the ages of 15 and 17 attend school.
Jatoba said it may be surprising that widespread misery still exists in a country that has undergone an important economic and social transformation since the 1990s. Many of Brazil’s accomplishments have been credited to Pernambuco’s most famous son, Lula, who grew up poor and was elected president in 2002.
“The city has lived for many years this kind of cruel coexistence between affluence in some areas and extreme poverty in some areas,” Jatoba said, sitting on his balcony in a high-rise apartment building in Recife, the lights of other buildings twinkling across the skyline.
Jatoba said the government must vastly improve education and other services and find ways to pull from the margins of society people who have never worked or do not read. That is not to say, he stressed, that job creation in the northeast is not chipping away at poverty.
Employment is increasing particularly quickly in Pernambuco as the state and private industry invest in highways and a $3.4 billion rail line. The linchpin of this region is the Suape port and industrial park, located on a former mangrove swamp south of Recife here in Ipojuca.
Although more than 30 years old, the complex has awakened only in recent years as investments increased dramatically. By 2014, $15 billion will be invested as Fiat completes a car plant, shipbuilding facilities are expanded and an oil refinery and petrochemical facility are opened, said Frederico da Costa Amancio, Suape’s chief executive.
Suape has 55,000 workers, 20,000 of them permanent, and Amancio expects 15,000 more in four years, many of whom will come from the ranks of rural agriculture. “It’s like an industrial revolution in our state,” he said.
Among those benefiting are workers such as Jorge Rocha, 40.
Until the end of last year, Rocha washed cars. With his meager wages, he had to bunk with relatives and, at times, struggled to pay for a good meal.
Now, Rocha is earning more than $600 a month, well above the minimum wage, driving heavy machinery at a construction site. Yet, he said, the memories of hardship are still fresh in his mind — and he reels off how many of those close to him are still struggling.
“Things are very precarious for them,” he said. “There are many people living with big necessities.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/fast-growing-brazil-tries-to-lift-its-poorest/2011/05/10/AFqgEEpG_story.html

POVERTY: Brazil’s reminder: Anti-poverty programs help

May 17 2011 : Lois Todhunter



I wonder whether members of Congress took a few minutes from their cries of “no new taxes” and slashing budgets for the programs that help the least among us to read the May 12 news story “Booming Brazil’s poverty problem.”
When he was Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva realized a vision of helping the poor, lifting 20 million Brazilians out of poverty through what the story described as “well-funded social programs.” As these 20 million Brazilians become workers and consumers, it is no coincidence that Brazil’s economy and its stature in the world are growing dramatically.

Our highly educated electorate should take a lesson from Mr. da Silva, who had little formal education, and his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, or it will not be long before we will be looking southward to find the superpower of the Americas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/brazils-reminder-anti-poverty-programs-help/2011/05/15/AFtPP55G_story.html

POVERTY: Brazil: 8.5 percent of population live in extreme poverty

Source: Xinhua  May 04, 2011

Brazil has 16.27 million people living in extreme poverty, which accounts for 8.5 percent of its total population, Minister of Social Development and Fight Against Hunger Tereza Campello announced.
The identification of persons who are below the poverty line was made by Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) at the request of the federal government to guide the program Brazil Without Poverty, which is to be released in the coming weeks by President Dilma Rousseff.
The program's goal is to ensure income transfer, access to public services and productive inclusion to lift the Brazilians from poverty, the main promises made by Rousseff for her government, which assumed office in January.
Presenting the data, Campello said that Brazil will manage to eradicate extreme poverty almost completely in four years.
"The federal government, state governments and municipalities are making an extraordinary effort to eradicate extreme poverty. We are not talking about a plan that will continue, but a task force. The plan ends in four years," she said.
Social programs that benefit poor families with income amounting to more than 70 reais (45 U.S. dollars), such as Family Grant will continue, but Brazil Without Poverty will be aimed especially at those who face more difficult situation.
According to the study conducted by IBGE, among Brazilians living in extreme poverty, 4.8 million have a nominal monthly household income equal to zero, while 11.43 million have an income of up to 70 reais (45 dollars) a month.
The document also showed that the vast majority of Brazilians in abject poverty is brown or black, both in rural and in urban areas.
Besides, 46.7 percent of people below the poverty line live in rural areas, although only 15.6 percent of the Brazilian population live in rural areas.
The largest number of people living in extreme poverty -- 9.6 million people or 59.1 percent of the total-- is from the Northeast region of the country.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90852/7369481.html