Poverty In Brazil

Poverty in Brazil
“Poverty is general scarcity or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money. It is a multifaceted concept including social, economic, and political elements,” (Poverty). One country that demonstrates these struggles is Brazil in South America. Fortunately, poverty in Brazil has been halved in the last two decades. Twenty-eight million people were upheaved from extreme poverty and thirty-six million were brought into the middle class, all by the hands of the government. Despite being the sixth largest economy in the world, Brazil’s GDP per capita ranks one hundredth, behind Iran and Costa Rica. Brazil still has room for improvement. Eight point five percent of the population (sixteen point two
million) lives on less than forty-five dollars per month. Out of that sixteen point two, four point eight million survive on no income at all (Ziomek). Solving poverty is not a simple feat, however there are many possible solutions.
Brazil invests a lot of money on social programs, but the impoverished class in Brazil only sees thirteen percent of the benefits compared to the twenty-four percent at the top (Ziomek).
Kelsey Ziomek states that “increased social spending would not alleviate poverty in Brazil. Rather, Brazil must restructure its spending to reach the poorest.” Low incomes, adverse climate conditions, and defined access to public services have resulted in migrations of large numbers of people to urban areas; primarily the larger cities in southeast Brazil (Rural Poverty Portal). With a big wave of people coming in search of job opportunities, chaos within the cities grows and it becomes harder to control. The Brazilian government could improve the amount of accessible and affordable health care information and services. Enhancing the work opportunities and incentives available for the poor so they are able to support themselves and their families with basic needs would help
immensely.
Other elements aiding poverty in Brazil are the absence of accessible formal education and skills training (Rural Poverty Portal).
More than seventy-two million children of elementary school age are not attending school and seven hundred and fifty-nine million adults are uneducated, rendering them unable to provide the proper care a family requires (Right to Education). “The lack of education in the developing world means more than just another generation of illiterate children, who will enter into the same cycle as their parents. This is a generation of children who will continue into a life of poverty, with no real tools to fight the cycle that plagues their families and villages,” (Clifford). Improving the quality of education for the poor children and education opportunities and incentives would make it easier for people to find work. With the youth educated, they can implement a stable household and keep their future children in school and become closer to ending
poverty.
Inequality of land tenure also has an effect on poverty. In beginning of the 1990s, northeastern Brazil was hit by severe droughts which threatened the livelihoods of many workers. As a result, newly unemployed plantation workers “organized and invaded unused land,” (Hidalgo and Richardson). Based off the information provided by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a church-based agrarian organization, aloft six hundred, sixty thousand families (over three million people) cooperated in “land invasions” in Brazil between 1988 and 2004. During this period, approximately four hundred, forty thousand families acquired land given by the government. “These invasions have in many cases been accompanied by violence and intense political conflicts,” (Hidalgo and Richardson). Land is very important to families because it provides food which can be sold for money and jobs. Small-scale agriculture, which is known as “family farming”, accounts for about seventy percent of some of the country’s staple food production and employs three quarters of farm labor. With the unequal distribution of land, families are unable to receive the land they deserve and need. According to Hidalgo and Richardson, rural conflicts can be solved by “social assistance programs in rural areas which would be one way to limit the vulnerability of rural workers to income shocks. Targeted transfer programs, particularly during periods of drought, could provide a form of income insurance to the rural poor so that joining a land invasion seems less attractive. Educing the extreme concentration of landownership would also ease rural tensions. Currently, the vast majority of land redistribution is ad hoc, occurring only in direct response to land invasions.” If we would fix the land distribution we would aid solving poverty. Each nation is affected by poverty and every day we strive to become closer to eliminating it. There are many solutions out there that aim to help those caught in this deficiency, but only so many actually achieve that goal. It takes a combination of well thought out solutions to solve such complicated problems of poverty. Of course, in order for these solutions to work, it takes cooperation and dedication on the parts of the people.