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Crafting
Policy Out of Charity
The Stakes and
Ambitions of Brazil’s Zero Hunger Program
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Brazil’s
left-wing President Lula |
There
may be but one name as connected as Brazil’s
President Lula da Silva’s to the Brazilian federal government’s flagship Fome Zero (Zero-Hunger)
program: Frei Betto. The liberation theologian and senior presidential advisor
came to prominence as one of Brazil’s leading intellectuals during the later
years of the military dictatorship (1964-1988). Since January 1, 2003, he is
coordinator, alongside Oded Grajew, of the Zero Hunger program’s “Social
Mobilization” task force.
Few intellectuals are up to
the moral task of this program. As with most of Lula’s policies it struggles
to exit the parameters of political promise. Given that the
former-union-leader-turned-president matched wits with the country’s premier
spin guru, Duda Mendonça, setbacks to this effort could hardly be surprising.
Then again, that was campaigning. The time now is to govern.
Endowed with one of the
clearest and most erudite expository styles in Lula’s intellectually rich
government, Frei Betto speaks a language of results. The problem he poses
reignites the old theory vs. praxis dilemma. Yet for all his analytical
brilliance and morally persuasive power, the question remains as to whether the
Dominican friar will be able to translate ought into is.
Philosophically, the program
would be of the highest experimental interest were millions of lives not at
stake. This factor only raises the science of thought to the most committed tier
of social responsibility. For the land of abundance known as Brazil is plagued
not only by endemic poverty, but by under- and malnourishment as well. In
Betto’s view, the road to tackling poverty is fraught with the milestones of
hunger.
Frei
Betto speaks a language of results. |
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On July 30, 2003, Frei Betto
was in São Paulo, Brazil’s financial and industrial capital. The
attendance awaited an up-date on the situation in Guaribas, Piauí state,
a town of 5000 and among the country’s most impoverished, and one of the first
localities to receive resources linked to Zero Hunger as a test case. Betto’s
news was encouraging: “The index of child mortality last January was 59.9 per
thousand births. Since April not a single child has died.”
The message also brought a
special focus to successful administration. Criticism raised by skeptics of the
Workers Party (PT) has continued to focus on the lack of administrative know-how
among party bureaucrats. As opposed to the countless moral arguments he has
penned for most of the country’s newspapers, the Friar was there to speak
facts: “The city’s first market is being built, and families of Guaribas
that used to live in the Piratininga favela [urban
conglomerations], in Osasco [São Paulo state], are returning to
Piauí.” Those who had taken the risk out of desperation to resettle in
the teeming slums of the world’s second largest city were now choosing to
return to a rural community. Like so many others of its kind, the town had been
left to wither and waste.
As localized and minute an
accomplishment as it is, the news projected its weight in scale. The prospect
and size of the change to be carried out in Brazil is daunting. As a first step,
the Guaribas pilot project bears out the reason for Betto’s optimistic
conference. The town resembles others to which Lula brought his entire cabinet
for a brusque baptism on the heels of last January’s inauguration. Guaribas
had not become affluent overnight from government handouts. Nor did it prove a
singular exception compared with the country’s currently dire productivity
rates, which are among the lowest in South America, below even Colombia’s.
The
Zero Hunger program would be of the highest experimental interest were
millions of lives not at stake. |
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It did something far more
important in Betto’s eyes: from unfound energy its residents were brought to
strength. The next step was theirs to make – under guidance from state social
workers. The aim of the program is to have the needy begin using credit
card-style food cards in nearly 200 areas in the impoverished North and
drought-stricken Northeast states. Each family is to receive a monthly 50 reais
(US$ 18) credit. If bureaucratic and social workers prove to be effective
administrators, Zero Hunger should be on course to reach up to 1.5 million
people by October.
The
policy’s managerial approach shares little with Northern center-left social
management techniques. The latter usually involve the wholesale transfer of
public resources to an often-deregulated private sector, whereas Frei Betto’s
lectures are the nearest form of philosophical lobbying in existence. Through
them, he has sought to compel major companies to give resources directly to the
program. This is the so-called Anti-Hunger Mutirão, the
community-based collective campaign. And the term is anything but surprising.
Wherever change is to be structurally brought about for the greater egalitarian
good, it is done so by means of “collective campaigns.” The
individual, his freedom and
property, is worth little in this task.
On the administrative side,
Minister José Graziano da Silva oversees the financial coherence of the program
at the Special Ministry of Food Security and Hunger Combat. He is seconded by
Brazil
’s largest supermarket chain in helping with distribution. In addition, Ford
Brazil
has pledged 200 tons of food. Companhia Vale do Rio Doce,
Latin America
’s largest mining firm, is matching every ton of nonperishable goods donated
by its employees with another ton, and has released funds for direct investment.
This is a bare minimum to be expected from a company privileged with total tax
exemption. As for the merchant banks, one is hard pressed to spot a single one
on the list.
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Frei
Betto, a driving force behind the Zero Hunger program |
If the whole purpose of Zero
Hunger is to transform charity into policy, even the notion of party
contributions has taken a spin. Funding a political party should now be done by
supporting its social programs directly.
Zero
Hunger leaves the realm of charity precisely at the point where various related
tasks converge into a hub. The big questions, namely endemic poverty and rampant
inequality, are being bypassed as if ruffling shirt collars were to take second
place to running surer concessions. Case in point: the town of
Guaribas
collated 160 tons of those famed
Brazilian beans. Instead of individual farmers searching out middlemen whose
ultimate end is to smash prices by trickster practices on ill-prepared peasants,
the community organized as a collective. Local decisions were made by a
supervisory committee composed of nine representatives of society – and this
democratic supplement is to become the standard throughout the program. By then
holding auctions, Betto reported on how a sac of beans usually selling at R$ 22
rose to between R$ 50 and R$ 70.
The
prospect and size of the change to be carried out in Brazil is
daunting. |
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Despite complaints from the opposition, the
government fully intends to use the network of charity organizations already
active in municipalities. Above all, the program’s objectives are to diminish
the very need to distribute food. Betto: “Most important is to promote income,
jobs, and hoist up self-esteem and the citizenry.” This is why the conjunction
of tasks also opens onto a policy crossroads; slashing away at illiteracy is
part and parcel of the project.
In this country of abundance, the existence of
mass hunger is a fact few of
Brazil
’s urban middle classes have acknowledged.
Brazil
is the fourth largest food exporter in the world. Yet as Minister Graziano
states in the opening pages of the government’s official Zero Hunger brochure,
“Today, nearly a third of the Brazilian population is in a situation of
‘food insecurity’, meaning that they do not eat well or well enough, with
regularity or dignity.”
Charity has been a feature of
successive national governments, but in some parts of the backlands conditions
of servitude hark back to previous centuries. Born into dire poverty in
Pernambuco state, Lula’s devotion to the program is practiced with poignancy.
On inauguration day, he introduced Zero Hunger twice, first after being handed
the presidential sash, and then upon accepting the presidency at the National
Congress. Both occasions led him to make a tearful, moving commitment to
eradicate hunger in his country. “If by the end of my mandate, all Brazilians
are able to have a daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, I will have accomplished
my life’s mission.” The message was repeated in Porto Alegre and Davos a few
weeks later, and on an international scale at the G7 summit in Athens.
Deep structural change might
alter the stakes for Brazil’s government, making it far less glorious in the
eyes of the IMF. This is mainly why it is trying to postpone what will be
stirred up, irregardless of its long-term vision. Frei Betto keeps reminding
Brazilians “first of all, we won an election. We did not wage a revolution.
This must be made clear.” In so doing, he offers the population a measure of
the task ahead, and the options to be chosen. Failing administrative competence,
how else, then, is it possible to
think or talk of eradicating hunger if not in the words of revolution? For
despite the alliteration, charity has never rhymed with Che.
Brazil’s Zero Hunger –
one part political marketing to three parts of the deepest national commitment
– has used all of the resources of social democratic patter to raise
itself. In a knot intertwining Marxism with Christendom, Frei Betto’s
liberation theology recalls Thomas Aquinas’ principle: “One cannot expect
the practice of virtue from a hungry man.”
Frei Betto’s strategy aims
at making every step of the program assimilative. Preserved from a structural
make over, the word poverty has not prompted the moneyed tiers to stop
cooperating. Corporations, investment banks, and latifundio
owners are the collective objects of Betto’s priming. As President Lula
repeated in a speech given at the headquarters of Petrobrás, the
State-owned oil company, on
September 2, 2003
, “an idea has been created in
Brazil
that the State is capable of everything. We want to prove that the State is
able to do far less than people imagine, but that its power to induce is so
great that if the policy of involving society is done correctly, I have
absolutely no doubt we’ll succeed in making a miracle of finishing up with
hunger in this country.”
Brazilians have had to pay a
high price for their PT government. Since the election campaign thrust into full
swing in August 2002, the average wealth of Brazilians has tumbled by 16%. The
Central Bank administers one of the highest prime interest rates worldwide,
notwithstanding its recent reduction from 26.5% to 22%. And unemployment is the
highest in 20 years. For all but the country’s biggest companies, 2002 was a
year to forget. The ghost of the 1980s, dubbed by economists as
Latin America
’s “forgotten decade,” is bursting from a whimper.
As
a hub, Zero Hunger aims to parlay several social programs into a pulsating web
of interaction. One of the key sectors being solicited in this campaign is
energy. The Financial Times recently profiled
Brazil
’s dynamic energy minister, Dilma Rousseff, a former guerilla fighter against
the dictatorship, who seeks partnership between the state and private sectors to
bring power to an estimated 13 million homes in the country’s poorest regions.
Referring to this campaign as “Zero Outage,” she has inserted it clearly
into the government’s overall plan.
The Zero Hunger program looks
down into the scandalous gulf afflicting all societies labored by concentration
of wealth and economic corruption. For the 1.5 billion poor living below the
international measure of US$ 1 a day, no good intentions can reverse a long
legacy of exploiting the peasantry. By hoisting the program to policy status, a
new cycle of struggle may be emerging.
It is said that Brazilians
are gifted with the highest degree of tolerance. For all the talk of solidarity,
for all the cooperation and good will, it must continually be recalled that Zero
Hunger is built not on the desperation linked to hunger, but on anger directed
towards what has permitted such circumstances to take flight in the first place.
Norman
Madarasz is a Canadian philosopher residing in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. With a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, he teaches and
writes on international relations, political economy and philosophy. He is also
a regular contributor to Counterpunch and has published think pieces and
philosophical research extensively. You can reach him at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
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