Larry Rohter has an article in today's Times about Lula's Fome Zero program and how it appears to have fallen short of its goals, or at least to be progressing very slowly. Part of the problem certainly appears to be one of auditing and maintaining better controls over the process:
Among the chief complaints is that benefits are incorrectly awarded
and incorrectly denied. In the state capital, Teresina, more than 1,100
city employees were found to have been fraudulently enrolled, while
here, some teachers' families ended up receiving stipends intended to
eliminate child labor, rather than the agricultural day laborers who
are meant to benefit.
"We found a lot of irregularities," said
João Florêncio Rodrigues Batista, a critic of the initial
administrative committee who became mayor here in January. "It was
supposed to be for poor families, but it ended up being for political
families, for the sons and daughters of the members of the town council
and other privileged types."
That's the sort of problem that one would expect could be easily remedied. The larger issue, however, is one of time and patience. Consider some facts about the city profiled in the article, Acauã. It is in the state of Piauí, which may be the poorest state in Brazil. Piauí is one of nine states that make up the northeast of Brazil, a region blessed with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world and cursed with some of the worst poverty in the Americas.
The capital of Piauí, Teresina, is the only capital of the Northeast states that is not on the coast. It also happens to have an average temperature of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). There is scant tourism in Piauí, and much of it is adventure tourism focusing on the Serra da Capivara and the Seven Cities National Parks. It has the smallest coastline of the Northeast states. Much of it is semi-arid, complicating an economy that is almost completing dependent on agriculture and livestock farming. Indeed, to his credit, Lula has focused much of the effort on the semi-arid region, which, as this map shows, runs from the north of Piauí and Ceará to the Jequitinonha Valley in northern Minas Gerais, a state which is designated part of the Southeast region. Who can blame the citizens of towns like Acauã for their exasperation at the glacial rate of progress here.
My father-in-law has a farm in the Jequitinonha* Valley near a town called Araçuaí*. I have mentoned this story before, but it bears repeating in the following context from Rohter's article:
There is still no hospital here, but the one clinic has received
some new equipment and supplies, giving many women here access to birth
control for the first time.
"A lot of women here are always
pregnant, and have a baby every year," said Arlete de Assis Ferreira de
Sousa, a 28-year-old peasant woman who is the president of a local
farmers' cooperative. "They don't have the money to feed or clothe
them, and they want to change that situation with contraceptives." [my emphasis]
I know I'm tilting at windmills here, but as a Roman Catholic, I really wish the church would change their views on contraception. My father-in-law had a man working for him once and I met him when we spent Christmas on the farm in 1997. He was kind, humble and a hard worker. He was also 32 years old, illiterate and had six children. This is a certain way for the cycle of grinding, brutal poverty to continue. I cannot imagine his children or grandchildren breaking this cycle. So, although the article is worth reading and ultimately fair, my deepest and most profound hope is that in another year it's completely wrong.
* Jequitinonha (pronounced Jay-key-chin-YON-ya) and Araçuaí (R-ahh-sue-EYE-eee) are two of those wonderful place names in Brazil that have a Tupi-Guarani origin. They are beautiful, but a nightmare to pronounce.
