Can
Brazil move from Third World
to First World?
By
Jonathan
Power
April 14, 2004
LONDON - In Recife one can see the real abomination
of Brazil. Over the last 30 years I've watched this north
eastern city's population grow like a fungus. A quarter
of the people of Brazil's fourth largest city live in the
crime-ridden, extremely violent, favelas (shanty towns),
many of them without sanitation. After I walked these
filthy, mud-laced streets and returned to stay at the
house of the local Catholic priests deep inside one
favela lines of a Kipling poem turned in my mind,
"Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built on the
silt/ Palace, byre, hovel- poverty and pride- side by
side/ And, above the packed and pestilential town, Death
looked down."
Last year the newly elected president, Luiz Inacio da
Silva, "Lula", brought his cabinet here. He was waylaid
with placards reading, "Lula, only you can save us".
Can Brazil move from Third World to First World? Can
it rid itself of its appalling differential between poor
and better off, which is holding back the pace of
economic growth? Can Brazil, the world's second most
successful country in terms of growth of the twentieth
century and its ninth largest economy, repeat this
achievement in the twenty first? Some would say,
after the dismal debt-ridden, inflation-consumed
performance of most of the last twenty years, with a
currency adding zeros faster than the printing presses
could turn, probably not. However, a growing number would
say it can, if it can off-load the albatrosses that hold
Brazil down.
Thanks to the purging economic discipline of Brazil's
last president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, combined with
the sober thriftiness of Lula's administration, Brazil
looks set again for a growth rate of 3.5%. According to
ex finance minister Ciro Gomes and today Minister for
National Integration responsible for the poverty-struck
northeast, "we have to get it above 5% if we are to start
to improve our income distribution". But this, many
economists say, is impossible given Brazil's present
biases and structures.
According to David Ferranti, the vice president for
Latin America of the World Bank, "before transfers, the
richest one percent of the population receives the same
ten percent share of total income as the poorest fifty
percent, one of the worst income distributions in the
world." "Brazil is not a poor country", he adds in
an interview in Brasilia. "The poverty gap is only 1.6%
of national income. Brazil spends more than ten times
this on various forms of social spending". The trouble is
that much of it is misspent, notably 100% pensions for
public sector workers and a disproportionate share of
state handouts to university students from well-to-do
families.
At last the international financial institutions are
beginning to make the same kind of arguments Lula has
been making for the best part of 30 years, since he was
worker and later a union leader in a car factory- "There
is increasing evidence that inequality adversely affects
growth, undermines social cohesion and increases crime",
states a recent World Bank report.
Brazil has made great strides in extending primary
education in the last decade, just as it has in reducing
dramatically the infant mortality rate. These days 96.5%
of all children go to school. But for the workforce to be
globally competitive the schools need better paid
teachers, more resources and a sharp increase in the
numbers attending secondary school, and the universities
have to widen their intake from the privileged few. South
Africa has made better progress than Brazil in closing
the educational gap between whites and non-whites.
Right now land reform is the sorest point. In the past
few weeks there has been a wave of protests and illegal
property invasions by the Landless Workers' Movement.
Their cause has an honorable pedigree stretching back to
the 1980s when clerics like the Archbishop of Recife,
Helder Camara, joined the rebels. In the north east 70%
of the land has long been owned by 4% of the people yet
studies have shown that small family-based farms get a
better performance per hectare than large holdings.
However, the protestors are in danger of running ahead
too fast. Under Cardoso 600,000 families were settled on
re-distributed or state land but the promised
agricultural revolution has not materialized. The
government seems inept at the necessary follow up- new
seeds, fertilizer, irrigation and regular expert advice.
It is giving land reform a bad name, but also beginning
to alienate the very poorest from Lula's government.
Still, in the favelas of Recife the mood remains
hopeful. I overheard one gas pump attendant debating with
a friend. "With a new job Lula has to learn", he said
with conviction. The masses in Brazil have always been
patient- but not docile. Many of the older favelas of
Recife have been improved and upgraded by the hard work
of the residents themselves.
Charles de Gaulle once said, "Brazil has a great
future. But it always will have". Need this be true? Not
necessarily, but to really change Brazil for the better
is going to tax Lula's legendary powers of leadership to
the limit.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Här kan
du läsa om - och köpa - Jonathan Powers bok
på svenska
"Som
Droppen Urholkar
Stenen"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|