Standing With Lula Means Standing Against Poverty

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Brazil Election: Standing With Lula Means Standing Against Poverty Joana Ramiro: Brazil is infamous for its wealth disparity. For many, it has become synonymous with city-sized slums like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, their culture commodified in music and film, their survivalist nature praised as 'entrepreneurial' by the most craven neoliberal minds. But destitution in Brazil extends beyond the shanty towns. Outside my window, in the centre of São Paulo, a man covered in dirt and dressed in ragged clothes is lying on the pavement. Commuters walk past him seemingly unperturbed, some having to nearly walk over his head in the early morning scramble to and from the metro station. This is not an isolated case, poverty is everywhere in the finance capital of Brazil. In front of São Paulo's Cathedral, thousands of destitute men and women congregate around bathing stations and soup kitchens. During the winter months, when temperatures plummet as low as 8ºC, volunteers hand out warm clothes from two large gazebos. In the last four years, this tragic reality has worsened with an estimated 33 million people – or 15.5% of the population – going hungry every day. The numbers come from a network of renowned Brazilian and international NGOs, including Oxfam. Yet the Jair Bolsonaro administration argues such figures are impossible and that the most vulnerable are already being helped by governmental benefit schemes.  After years on the UN hunger map – which tracks countries where over 2.5% of the population lacks food – the country was finally removed from the list in 2014, after it reduced the number of people suffering from food insecurity by 82%. To thank were the policies of social investment implemented by the Workers Party (PT) in its nine years in power. In particular, the zero hunger programme, introduced in 2003 under the first Lula da Silva government, was seen internationally as exemplary of how to conduct a successful social campaign in the context of a wider, comprehensive scheme of benefits and state initiatives.  Yet during the pandemic, Brazil returned to the hunger map, with many blaming Bolsonaro's mishandling of the crisis. The problem is now so flagrant that during the last presidential debate on Thursday, it wasn't the left but the main centre-right candidate, Simone Tebet, who confronted Bolsonaro over his failure to tackle poverty and hunger. "Let's talk about Brazil, let's talk about the real problems, let's talk about hunger, which your excellency, as president, says is non-existent", the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) candidate said. "You don't know Brazil's reality," she added, "Like walking around in the big city centres and seeing children by traffic lights going hungry and begging for a plate of food." 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