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Corona crisis in Brazil: the lockdown is over, starvation continues

2021-10-17T07:16:37.565Z


A homeless person has to go to jail because she stole food for the equivalent of 3.50 euros: In Brazil, Corona has widened the social gap. People are suffering more than before.


Enlarge image

A man searches meat waste on a truck in Rio de Janeiro

Photo: Domingos Peixoto / O Globo / picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com

On the last Wednesday of September, Rosangela Sibele de Almeida Melo hadn't eaten all day.

She was cold.

At around 8 p.m. she ran into a supermarket in the Vila Mariana district in the south of the city of São Paulo.

She took a 600ml bottle of Coca-Cola from the shelf, a packet of instant powder for lemon juice, two noodle soups and a condensed milk.

She put the condensed milk back.

She had no money.

When she was about to leave the shop, a saleswoman held her.

Two policemen patrolling the street rushed over.

Almeida Melo, 41, mother of five, tried to run away, but fell down.

The police handcuffed her and put her in custody.

The total value of the stolen goods was just under 22 reals, the equivalent of just under 3.50 euros.

Three times, courts refused to release the divorced woman, whose children are currently living with their mother. "I was hungry," Almeida Melo defended himself. “We have to be stricter in these times,” argued judge Luciana Menezes Scorza, “the people who stay at home must be protected from those who take to the streets with the sole aim of committing a crime.” In plain English : Almeida Melo should isolate herself at home so as not to endanger anyone in the pandemic, instead of stealing food in a shop.

Almeida Melo is homeless. The fact that she had no home to retreat to apparently didn't matter to the judge. It is an argument that, in its ignorance, is reminiscent of the cynical quote that the French social philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau once noted: "If they have no bread, let them eat cake."

The "criminalization and punishment of poverty", as the Catholic priest Padre Julio Lancellotti called it in the online newspaper Ponte Jornalismo, is only one expression of the enormous social crisis Brazil is currently experiencing. With more than 600,000 corona deaths, the country is badly hit by the pandemic, but also by its economic consequences. A recovery, as is currently being observed in the USA and parts of Europe, is not in sight here - at least not for the poor.

Because this group is significantly poorer than it was before the crisis. “Many slipped. We have more favelas, more slums, more homeless people, ”says political scientist Camila Kimie Ugino. 27 million Brazilians are now considered poor, which means that they have less than 41 euros per person a month to spend. 19 million of them were starving in 2020. Overall, more than half of the people in the country were affected by food insecurity. During protests against the government, the demonstrators simply demand: "Food on your plate."

There are many reasons for the misery. "Corona was like a big storm after years of bad weather," says economist Macelo Neri from the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. Even before the pandemic, the country was stuck in a chronic crisis and the economy stagnated, and investors ran away due to a lack of political stability. The shock from the pandemic is now particularly deep - and it has further exacerbated the already extreme inequality.

This is mainly due to the weakened labor market: Almost ten percent of income from work has been lost since the beginning of the pandemic to this day. Above all, the lower earnings are affected: Here 21.5 percent of the total income has been destroyed. The informal sector, which consists mainly of service jobs like cleaning, cooking or selling on the street, has been hit hardest. "That means that the poor suffer most from the crisis," Neri said. Around a third of these people would have lost their jobs in the pandemic.

The persistence of the trend is particularly worrying: while the Brazilian gross domestic product has now recovered, this seems to be the case in the labor market only slowly. So with the end of most lockdowns and the progress of the vaccination campaign, jobs are not just coming back. Companies have gone bankrupt or are saving jobs, international corporations have partially withdrawn from the country, and private households are spending less money. Anyone who has slipped from a precarious position into complete poverty does not simply climb the social ladder again.

As a long-term consequence of the pandemic, the country is threatened with a lost generation: unemployment is particularly high among young people of all places. The educational failures due to closed schools are immense and here too inequality is reproduced. While expensive private schools quickly made good, digital learning opportunities and are now open again, children from the favela - who often have no access to digital devices or no internet connection at home - are sometimes only allowed to go to school one day a week.

In addition, the poorer population is more affected by high inflation than those with higher incomes. This was recently more than ten percent. The price of staple foods and gas that is used for cooking was well above average. The price for a basic grocery basket rose from 500 real (78 euros) in São Paulo in December 2019 to 673 real (105 euros) in September 2021. Such a basket contains goods such as milk, beans, rice, potatoes, sugar and oil and should be able to care for up to four people for ten days.

Meat has become unaffordable for many Brazilians. The pictures of the photographer Domingo Peixoto recently caused an outcry: They show people queuing in Rio de Janeiro for bones and meat scraps sorted out by supermarkets. In the past these leftovers ended up in the garbage, today they are sold. One of the pictures was printed on the cover of Extra magazine. "That shocked people because this poverty is usually hidden and not shown," says the political scientist Ugino, "in the big urban centers we have an apartheid between the poor and the richer classes."

Brazil finds itself in what economists call "stagflation" - a situation of high unemployment and high inflation at the same time.

In order to counteract rising inflation, the Brazilian central bank recently increased interest rates.

But this policy is now in turn having a negative effect on wages and the job market, after all, the amount of money in circulation is to be reduced.

In such a situation, pretty much every measure resembles a "blanket that is too short," says the economist Neri.

Pull on one side and your feet would be uncovered, then on the other and your chest would be exposed.

The fact that the number of poor in Brazil's statistics is not much higher is mainly due to the comparatively generous Corona emergency aid program of the government under President Jair Bolsonaro.

about a third

the Brazilian benefits from it, and not just the poorest.

However: "The emergency aid program is expensive, but not particularly sustainable," says Neri.

Money was quasi "thrown from the helicopter".

That, he believes, will soon take revenge. The registers are empty. In October the last payment of the emergency aid took place for the time being. "After that, we must expect the situation to deteriorate further." More targeted programs such as the Bolsa-Famila, a kind of social assistance introduced under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have been reduced in recent years and access to them has been made more difficult, says the political scientist Ugino.

After the presidential election in 2022, both are hoping for a new government that will succeed in reconciling an intelligent economic policy with an efficient social policy. "The problem is complex, there is no simple solution," says Neri. On the other hand, Brazil also has good prerequisites: for example, a strong, comprehensive health and social system.

The homeless mother Sibele de Almeida Melo from São Paulo has since been released from prison.

This was decided by a higher court in the capital Brasilia.

Her case had received a lot of attention in the Brazilian media.

It is unclear how many are still in custody for similar crimes.

"We don't know how many people are arrested for crimes committed out of starvation," says lawyer Viviane Balbuglio from the civil rights organization Sisters of Santa Cruz, "but there are certainly thousands."

This contribution is part of the Global Society project

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The project is long-term and will be supported for three years by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is supporting the project for three years with a total of around 2.3 million euros.

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The editorial content is created without the influence of the Gates Foundation.

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In the past few years, SPIEGEL has already implemented two projects with the European Journalism Center (EJC) and the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: the “Expedition ÜberMorgen” on global sustainability goals and the journalistic refugee project “The New Arrivals” as part of this several award-winning multimedia reports on the topics of migration and flight have been produced.

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Source: spiegel

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