Brazil resumes subsidies to the poorest with pandemic worsening

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Brazilian government resumed on Tuesday the payment of subsidies intended to alleviate the economic hardship caused by the covid-19 pandemic among the poorest. Aid now covers a smaller universe of people and with lower values.

The resumption of this pandemic aid, which had already been given between April and December 2020, was forced by the worsening of the pandemic, which in Brazil has already left almost 333,000 dead and more than 13 million infected, forcing part of the country to keep economic activity restricted and impacting unemployment rates.

However, pressured by a fiscal deficit soaring to 14% of GDP due to the health crisis in 2020, the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has reduced both the value of subsidies and the number of beneficiaries.

During the past year, this subsidy plan covered 68 million people between March and December, with values of R$ 600 (US$ 110) during the first seven months, which then dropped by half in the final stage.

Now, and for an initial period of four months, these subsidies will reach 45.6 million people, and the amount, depending on the social condition, will vary between R$ 150 (US$ 27) and R$ 375 (US$ 67) per month.

According to the Government, among the beneficiaries will be approximately 14 million unemployed people. This time, not all informal workers will be included, who make up a universe estimated at some 50 million people.

Bolsonaro has admitted that the beneficiaries should “be more” and that the amount of the aid “is meager”, but he has also clarified that this money is “debt” that the government is contracting, so he stresses daily that the country “must get back to work as soon as possible”.

According to the Brazilian Food Sovereignty Research Network, an NGO dedicated to poverty studies, last year, almost 55% of the 210 million Brazilians had “some degree of nutritional deficit” due to the pandemic.

Among them, and despite the subsidy, there were 19 million people who “went hungry”, a situation mitigated by hundreds of popular organizations that distribute food in the favelas and “pockets of poverty” that exist in the country.

In fact, Bolsonaro visited one of these organizations last weekend, where he again attributed the hunger to “the policy of closing everything”, which “destroys jobs” and “does not let the people work”.

QUEUES FOR SUBSIDIES, QUEUES FOR VACCINES, QUEUES FOR HOSPITALS

The first of the four installments of the subsidy will be paid in a staggered manner during the next two weeks. This Tuesday only reached 5% of the 45.6 million beneficiaries, but that did not prevent huge lines of people from forming in front of the Caixa Economica Federal headquarters, the public bank responsible for the payment.

In several cities, people began to form these lines in the early hours of the morning and waited up to four hours to be attended, in many cases without the social distancing imposed by the pandemic.

The same happened in many vaccination centers, which are advancing slowly due to the lack of doses, which have reached about 10% of the population.

As in the Caixa Economica headquarters, thousands of people were crowded from early morning to receive the first dose of AstraZeneca or Sinovac vaccines, the only two that are applied in the country.

Another line, invisible but more worrying, is in the waiting list of covid-19 patients to access intensive care beds, which in many hospitals are fully occupied.

This is the situation in the state of Sao Paulo, the most populated and hardest hit by the health crisis in the country, which today registered a new daily record of deaths due to coronavirus, with 1,389 deaths in 24 hours.

Source: efe