Corona is followed by hunger: Brazil’s second epidemic

The corona pandemic hit Brazil hard – many people died, but many also lost their jobs and slipped into poverty. A new epidemic is now raging among them: hunger.

Valéria Sabina opens her refrigerator. It’s almost empty, except for a bottle of water, a pot of boiled beans, a green tomato and a little salt. She has no money, she notes, it is simply no longer enough for anything. They used to have work and a livelihood – now they are dependent on food donations. And she talks about other people who have to sell their belongings because there is nothing to eat.

This is the case with almost all families here in the Favela Catiri in Bangu, a suburb in the west of Rio de Janeiro. That’s why Auricélia Mercês, who does volunteer work in the favela, got up at dawn to drive an old Fiat to the center of Rio, two hours away. There, in a huge industrial hall, thousands of packages of food are stored. It says “Natal sem fome”, “Christmas without hunger”. 1500 tons of food are distributed across the country, making it the largest fundraising campaign in years.

“The hunger is great,” says Auricélia, and it hurts. At first people would have cried because they lost their loved ones in the pandemic, now they cried because they have nothing to eat: “They can no longer afford it. Because almost everyone lost their jobs during the pandemic.”

The hunger is back

A second epidemic is spreading in Brazil – hunger. For more than 100 million Brazilians, half of the population, food security is not guaranteed. That means: certain foods such as meat, dairy products or vegetables are no longer on the table, the quality of the food declines, and this leads to malnutrition.

20 million people are directly hungry. Daniel Souza, chairman of the NGO “Ação da Cidadania” knows that Brazil had a hunger problem even before the pandemic, after a whole series of programs with which Brazil successfully combated hunger had been dismantled in recent years. The data for 2018 and 2019 showed that the famine was already there – “the pandemic has now made it massively worse”.

Discarded the achievements

In the 1990s, Brazil began to set up programs to counter the rampant hunger; under the government of ex-President Lula da Silva, they were expanded, also financed by the raw materials boom of the 2000s. Thanks to higher minimum wages, transfer payments for poor families and the expansion of school meals, hunger has been defeated. In 2014, the United Nations World Food Program removed Brazil from its map of the world.

Now the hunger is back. Valéria Sabina is especially angry with the government of Jair Bolsonaro. When he came into office, things got worse, especially for the poor. You have always been able to take care of yourself, but now it is “critical”.

“The political will is missing”

During the pandemic, food prices exploded, also because the national currency, the real, lost massively in value. The price of rice alone rose by 70 percent and oil by 30 percent. Although the government launched an aid program at the beginning of the pandemic, it has since been severely restricted – there is a lack of political will, says Auricélia Mercés. She brought 100 parcels of basic food from Rio’s center to the favela and distributed them so that something was on the table at least for Christmas.

Brazil, she criticizes, is living “in a social abyss,” and she asks how it could be that people are still starving in a rich country that exports food around the world.

Mercés addresses the contrast to what people would see on TV at Christmas, food everywhere in the shows and in the commercials. “People look at their own reality and have nothing that hurts.” She and her colleagues fought against this injustice – “we just believe that there can be a better world”.