By Fabio Teixeira
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Coronavirus is spreading and deaths are mounting – but what most worries the leaders of Brazil’s isolated and vulnerable communities is how on earth to feed people now government has pulled their main emergency aid.
Ivone Rocha is co-founder of Semeando Amor, a non-profit that distributes basic staples to some of the very poorest people in Rio das Pedras, one of Rio de Janeiro’s many favelas.
For most of last year, they had received a decent government stipend to survive the pandemic, but that all ended with 2020, unleashing a frenzy of favela requests for food.
“People here have no jobs,” Rocha told Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. “Now the aid has ended. My God, what will happen?”
It was April when Congress first passed a bill that established the monthly R$600 ($112) stipend – a little over half the country’s minimum wage – pledging to tide people over the pandemic for three months.
By July, almost half of the 210 million people who call Brazil home lived with someone getting the aid, government data shows.
Even before COVID-19, some Brazilians were in a dire state, with some 13 million living in extreme poverty and a full quarter of the population classified as below the World Bank’s poverty line, according to government data.
Initially opposed, President Jair Bolsonaro embraced the program and renewed it through the rest of 2020, while slashing the total in half due to what he called budgetary constraints.
This in a nation where the fast-mutating virus has already killed about 212,000 people, data shows, a national death toll surpassed only by the United States.
