Photo: Internet Reproduction
Amid the COVID-19 shock, emergency aid temporarily halted the worsening of poverty in the country in 2020, but seems to have only anesthetized the problem. With this benefit coming and going over the past year, poverty lurks for the most vulnerable Brazilians. Without social programs, the poorest 10% of the population would have survived last year only BRL 13.00 per month, or BRL 0.43 per capita per day.
The account – the amount received with emergency aid and supplemental state and municipal benefits, excluding the composition of family income – was released yesterday by Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), but it does not appear to be a good answer to the hardships of 23-year-old Daniele. can be described. The first, who yesterday, along with her mother, Adinalva, collected food from a garbage dump at Sisa, a vegetable and fruit marketing center north of Rio. Danielle, a mother of twins, faced the pandemic crisis without emergency help.
risk pregnancy. “My pregnancy was at risk, and I was hospitalized most of the time,” she said, as she relished a fine clove of garlic among hundreds of others whose fortunes would be trash. “Because of that, I couldn’t go and solve it and I was without emergency help. Now, I have to put my kids on Bolsa Familia, right? I haven’t solved it yet.”
Danielle’s mother, who shares the home with her daughter and eight others, has been collecting food at Sesa for nearly two decades. Last year’s emergency relief “helped a little,” but it didn’t help. “I first earned BRL 1,600, then BRL 600, then BRL 370 … Now, it’s BRL 320. It just got smaller, and everything got bigger. You take things out of here, but you have to cook . . . you have to wash, and the cost of water is absurd. For gas, I pay $95”, Edinva said.
Although he has been studying income inequality in Brazil for years, Marcelo Medeiros, a visiting professor at Columbia University in the United States, said he was “shocked”. With government benefits, the poorest group of 21 million Brazilians lived in 2020 with R$128 per month per family member. Although still insufficient, this amount represents an increase of 14.9% as compared to the monthly BRL 111 of 2019.
The injection of billions of dollars of extraordinary resources brought the number of Brazilians below the World Bank’s poverty line in 2020 to its lowest level since 2014. Nevertheless, practically one in four Brazilians (24.1% of the population) lived below this poverty. Queue. line last year. There are about 51 million people with less than R$450 per month. If it were not for income transfer programmes, this party would have been about a third of the population (32.1%). The ratio was 25.9% in 2019.
Even with emergency aid, 12.046 million (5.7%) lived below the poverty line (median monthly income of R$155 per capita) in 2020, the lowest level since 2015. Without benefits, this would have more than doubled: 27.313 million (12.9% of the population, compared to 6.8% in 2019). This information has been received from the newspaper O Estado de S Paulo.
