Brazil guide
Although perhaps best known for football and the glamour of carnival, the unequal and violent reality of life in Brazil has many negative consequences for development and human rights in general, and specifically for the country's ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals, although some progress is now being made. Brazil has taken a pioneering approach to HIV/AIDS control and supported the use of free and open source software, but there are contradictions in its role in the climate crisis - it is the world's largest producer and consumer of biofuels at the same time as it fails to prevent the ongoing deforestation of its Amazon region.
updated January 2009
Poverty in Brazil
Contemporary Brazil, an upper middle-income country, is beginning to make progress in countering its reputation for one of the highest levels of socioeconomic inequality in the world. Much of the redistribution is attributed to social programmes adopted since 2000 and strengthened under the current government, in particular the Bolsa Família (a family-based income-support programme) which has attracted international attention. Over 10 million families receive benefits which are conditional on children’s enrolment for immunisation and schools.
However, there are calls for such programmes to be accompanied by greater investments in health and education, to sustain and advance the relatively modest improvements to date. Although 97% of Brazilian children are enrolled in primary school, the quality of state education remains a cause for concern. Teachers in the state system are underpaid, often work in poor conditions and have little access to training.
Uneven income distribution combines with other inequalities to pose the main obstacle to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Brazil. Less than 3% of the population controls two thirds of the land available for production. 4.8 million rural families are landless and more than 80% of Brazilians are now concentrated in urban areas, where many live in favelas (shantytowns) with inadequate water, sanitation, health facilities and educational opportunities. The inequality is also regional - the northeast of the country is the poorest region whilst research by a Brazilian NGO, Imazon, records that most MDG indicators in Brazil's Amazon states are well below the national average.
Nonetheless, there is some cause for celebration. A government report on the MDGs published in August 2007 showed that the country has already met the first MDG target, having achieved a reduction in the percentage of Brazilians living on less than one dollar a day from 9.5% to 4.2% between 1992 and 2005. In consequence, the government has set itself the tougher target of reducing this measure to 2.4% by 2015 as well as eliminating hunger altogether. Chronic malnutrition in children under five years fell from 13% in 1996 to 7% in 2006, and there was an even bigger drop in the northeast, from 22.1% to 5.9%.
Health in Brazil
Although there continues to be inequality between different regions of Brazil and between different ethnic groups, a UNICEF report released in early 2008 also showed impressive reductions in levels of infant and child mortality. With a rate of progress above the global average, Brazil is therefore already very close to achieving the fourth MDG, for reducing child mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.
Brazil has around 620,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, the largest number in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Although the number of new cases is levelling off, infection rates are on the rise among women, black and mixed-race Brazilians, and the poor. The Ministry of Health's strategy for dealing with the disease combines prevention (some of the condoms it distributes will now be produced in a state-run factory in the Amazon region) and treatment - HIV/AIDS patients receive antiretroviral drugs free of charge from the government. This is possible because the drugs are either manufactured at low-cost, as generics, produced and sold without patent, or purchased at a discounted price negotiated directly with foreign pharmaceutical companies. This approach has attracted praise and is generally regarded as an international model, although there are concerns about the sustainability of the programme, which is just over ten years old.
Brazil’s national health system, the Sistema Único de Saúde or SUS, is also recognised for using innovative methods to involve ordinary citizens in shaping policy and holding the government accountable for delivery although universal access to primary care is not yet reality.
Climate Change in Brazil
Brazil is caught up in a vortex of contradictory forces triggered by climate change. The country’s priceless natural assets of tropical forest and high yielding agricultural land are at risk of gradual desertification and falling yields as temperatures rise. Yet Brazil is itself the world’s eighth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely caused by deforestation, The country is also at the centre of fierce global debate about the role of ethanol and biodiesel in reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Protection of the rainforest from illegal logging, mining, road building and encroachment of soya farming is central to these tensions. Often mistakenly perceived as an empty space, the Brazilian Amazon is home to an estimated 20 million people - some in cities and towns - and many of them indigenous peoples, seringueiros (rubber-tappers), or riberinhos (inhabitants of traditional river communities), who make practical and sustainable use of the forest in their way of life. The rights of these groups and the value of the immense biological diversity are themselves fundamental reasons to bring deforestation under control, quite apart from the fight against global warming.
After three years of promising reductions in the figures, a study by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research published in 2008 found that deforestation had increased sharply compared to the previous year. The Brazilian government has now announced deforestation targets, although they fall short of civil society proposals. It has also set up an international fund to protect the Amazon rainforest, anticipating that world climate change negotiations will lead to multi-billion dollar grants to reduce deforestation.
Success in protecting the forest will depend on a more strategic use of genetically modified soya and other crops in Brazil. There are also concerns about the use of soya and sugar cane for the production of biofuels (Brazil is the world's largest producer and consumer of ethanol). Although sugar cane is not grown to any extent in the Amazon region, many environmentalists are concerned that Brazil's high profile support for renewable energy sources creates knock-on pressures to convert forest into land for soya or cattle-ranching. There is evidence that recent trends in the rate of deforestation are directly linked to sharp rises and falls in world demand for the country’s agricultural products, especially soya.
Politics in Brazil
The current president, Inácio "Lula" Da Silva, was sworn in for a second four-year term in January 2007. His government is a coalition led by the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), or Workers' Party, which he helped to found. It grew out of a period of industrial unrest which mobilised a variety of left-wing groups and social movements into an opposition party, ultimately leading to the overthrow of the military dictatorship which ruled the country between 1964 and 1985 and the re-establishment of democracy. Although there are many political parties in Brazil, and politicians often change their allegiances during their careers, the main power dispute is between two large alliances, the PT and PMDB parties versus the PSDB and DEM.
However, one area of Brazilian politics which gives cause for concern is the low number of women candidates standing for and elected to public office. This is despite an established and diverse women's movement which has worked hard to put women’s demands on the table and shows how a long-overdue political reform process in 2007 failed to establish a fairer system of representation.
Although Lula’s time in office has not been trouble-free, with allegations of corruption surfacing several times, particularly in 2005 with the mensalão vote-buying scandal in Brazil’s Congress and its ongoing ramifications, Lula himself managed to escape relatively unscathed. In fact, at the end of 2008 he enjoyed record approval ratings of around 70%, a reflection of public confidence in his ability to manage the national economy during the global financial crisis. A presidential election is due in 2010, at which point Lula will be constitutionally obliged to stand down.
Civil Society in Brazil
Today, Brazil has a thriving civil society culture, and thousands of NGOs. The largest social movement in Latin America is also Brazilian - the Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) or Landless Workers' Movement, in existence since 1984. Like other social movements in Brazil, it was traditionally very close to the PT, but this relationship is changing with the PT in power. The MST's main concern is the fight for agrarian reform, and MST members all over Brazil are involved in land occupations. Many national and international NGOs support the MST in its fight which also involves the practice of agroecology, a growing movement in Brazil.
Brazil is also well known as the cradle of the World Social Forum process, an international gathering of activists, social movements, NGOs and other groups to reflect on and propose alternatives to globalisation and neo-liberalism around the slogan "another world is possible" which was first held in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001.
Human Rights in Brazil
Although Brazil's constitution and laws recognise universal human rights, there are many ongoing problems in this area, including in particular police and prison violence, torture and extrajudicial killings. Urban Brazil, where the majority of the population lives, suffers from a high level of crime.
Much of the armed conflict in Rio de Janeiro is between the police and the different drug gangs which control the favelas, or between rival drug gangs, and often spills over to affect ordinary people, particularly those living in favelas. Increasingly, militia made up of current or previous members of the security forces are also often present in these communities.
This was the focus of a strongly critical 2008 report by Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. His report estimated that police are responsible for one in five killings in Brazil. Many children are caught up in the conflict through their employment in the drugs trade, with homicide rates for children and youth in Rio de Janeiro comparable to and in some cases higher than those in wartorn countries.
Rural activists, such as members of the MST and indigenous peoples, continue to suffer intimidation and violent attacks, being killed in increasing numbers as a result of their fight for land and other rights in rural Brazil. Again, the perpetrators of these attacks, often a complicated web of individuals and interests, tend to go unpunished. Slave labour is another problem in rural areas, particularly in the booming sugar cane industry.
Violence against women is also a cause for concern in what is an extremely machista culture. It is estimated that every fifteen seconds a Brazilian woman suffers from violence, but despite the existence of women's police stations and the "Maria da Penha" law passed in 2006, levels of reporting remain low.
Information and Media in Brazil
Media ownership in Brazil is dominated by a small number of large private companies, often family-owned. The largest is the Globo empire which includes both terrestrial and cable television, radio, internet and newspapers. This polarisation is an issue for civil society which wants more democratic access to the media and better representation of the cultural diversity of Brazil.
The inequality which marks Brazil in many other aspects is also apparent when it comes to access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, access to telephones and the internet has risen dramatically in recent years, largely as a result of privatisation of the telecommunications sector, and mobile phones are also increasingly widespread. While Brazilian users dominate on the popular social networking site Orkut, and make enthusiastic use of YouTube, around two thirds of the country's population has never accessed the internet. The north and north-east regions of the country have markedly less internet access points than the rest of the country. Community radios also continue to have a difficult existence in Brazil, with regular stories of stations being closed down by government agents and a long and bureaucratic process to secure a licence.
There are many innovative initiatives by civil society, private foundations and federal, state and local governments to provide internet access and capacity-building to poorer groups. A number of different federal government ministries run digital inclusion programmes including the provision of satellite connectivity, the establishment of telecentres, support for multimedia cultural production, and the sale of low-cost computers to Brazilians on a lower income, but an overarching strategy is still missing.
Under the PT, the Brazilian government has become a vocal advocate of free and open source software or software livre both nationally and internationally (though there are some inconsistencies).
The OneWorld Brazil Guide was first published in December 2004 with a text written by Volunteer Editor Tori Holmes
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| At a recycling yard in Belo Horizonte © United Nations Development Programme |
However, there are calls for such programmes to be accompanied by greater investments in health and education, to sustain and advance the relatively modest improvements to date. Although 97% of Brazilian children are enrolled in primary school, the quality of state education remains a cause for concern. Teachers in the state system are underpaid, often work in poor conditions and have little access to training.
Uneven income distribution combines with other inequalities to pose the main obstacle to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Brazil. Less than 3% of the population controls two thirds of the land available for production. 4.8 million rural families are landless and more than 80% of Brazilians are now concentrated in urban areas, where many live in favelas (shantytowns) with inadequate water, sanitation, health facilities and educational opportunities. The inequality is also regional - the northeast of the country is the poorest region whilst research by a Brazilian NGO, Imazon, records that most MDG indicators in Brazil's Amazon states are well below the national average.
Nonetheless, there is some cause for celebration. A government report on the MDGs published in August 2007 showed that the country has already met the first MDG target, having achieved a reduction in the percentage of Brazilians living on less than one dollar a day from 9.5% to 4.2% between 1992 and 2005. In consequence, the government has set itself the tougher target of reducing this measure to 2.4% by 2015 as well as eliminating hunger altogether. Chronic malnutrition in children under five years fell from 13% in 1996 to 7% in 2006, and there was an even bigger drop in the northeast, from 22.1% to 5.9%.
Health in Brazil
Although there continues to be inequality between different regions of Brazil and between different ethnic groups, a UNICEF report released in early 2008 also showed impressive reductions in levels of infant and child mortality. With a rate of progress above the global average, Brazil is therefore already very close to achieving the fourth MDG, for reducing child mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.
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| Dancing against AIDS in Brazil © Changemakers.net |
Brazil’s national health system, the Sistema Único de Saúde or SUS, is also recognised for using innovative methods to involve ordinary citizens in shaping policy and holding the government accountable for delivery although universal access to primary care is not yet reality.
Climate Change in Brazil
Brazil is caught up in a vortex of contradictory forces triggered by climate change. The country’s priceless natural assets of tropical forest and high yielding agricultural land are at risk of gradual desertification and falling yields as temperatures rise. Yet Brazil is itself the world’s eighth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely caused by deforestation, The country is also at the centre of fierce global debate about the role of ethanol and biodiesel in reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Protection of the rainforest from illegal logging, mining, road building and encroachment of soya farming is central to these tensions. Often mistakenly perceived as an empty space, the Brazilian Amazon is home to an estimated 20 million people - some in cities and towns - and many of them indigenous peoples, seringueiros (rubber-tappers), or riberinhos (inhabitants of traditional river communities), who make practical and sustainable use of the forest in their way of life. The rights of these groups and the value of the immense biological diversity are themselves fundamental reasons to bring deforestation under control, quite apart from the fight against global warming.
After three years of promising reductions in the figures, a study by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research published in 2008 found that deforestation had increased sharply compared to the previous year. The Brazilian government has now announced deforestation targets, although they fall short of civil society proposals. It has also set up an international fund to protect the Amazon rainforest, anticipating that world climate change negotiations will lead to multi-billion dollar grants to reduce deforestation.
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| Amazon burning © Environment News Service (ENS) |
Politics in Brazil
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| Lula da Silva © Radio Netherlands |
However, one area of Brazilian politics which gives cause for concern is the low number of women candidates standing for and elected to public office. This is despite an established and diverse women's movement which has worked hard to put women’s demands on the table and shows how a long-overdue political reform process in 2007 failed to establish a fairer system of representation.
Although Lula’s time in office has not been trouble-free, with allegations of corruption surfacing several times, particularly in 2005 with the mensalão vote-buying scandal in Brazil’s Congress and its ongoing ramifications, Lula himself managed to escape relatively unscathed. In fact, at the end of 2008 he enjoyed record approval ratings of around 70%, a reflection of public confidence in his ability to manage the national economy during the global financial crisis. A presidential election is due in 2010, at which point Lula will be constitutionally obliged to stand down.
Civil Society in Brazil
Today, Brazil has a thriving civil society culture, and thousands of NGOs. The largest social movement in Latin America is also Brazilian - the Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) or Landless Workers' Movement, in existence since 1984. Like other social movements in Brazil, it was traditionally very close to the PT, but this relationship is changing with the PT in power. The MST's main concern is the fight for agrarian reform, and MST members all over Brazil are involved in land occupations. Many national and international NGOs support the MST in its fight which also involves the practice of agroecology, a growing movement in Brazil.
Brazil is also well known as the cradle of the World Social Forum process, an international gathering of activists, social movements, NGOs and other groups to reflect on and propose alternatives to globalisation and neo-liberalism around the slogan "another world is possible" which was first held in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001.
Human Rights in Brazil
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| Masked policeman, Brazil © Amnesty International - International Secretariat |
Much of the armed conflict in Rio de Janeiro is between the police and the different drug gangs which control the favelas, or between rival drug gangs, and often spills over to affect ordinary people, particularly those living in favelas. Increasingly, militia made up of current or previous members of the security forces are also often present in these communities.
|
| Child 'soldiers' in Brazil © Anja Kessler / Americas Policy Program |
Rural activists, such as members of the MST and indigenous peoples, continue to suffer intimidation and violent attacks, being killed in increasing numbers as a result of their fight for land and other rights in rural Brazil. Again, the perpetrators of these attacks, often a complicated web of individuals and interests, tend to go unpunished. Slave labour is another problem in rural areas, particularly in the booming sugar cane industry.
Violence against women is also a cause for concern in what is an extremely machista culture. It is estimated that every fifteen seconds a Brazilian woman suffers from violence, but despite the existence of women's police stations and the "Maria da Penha" law passed in 2006, levels of reporting remain low.
Information and Media in Brazil
Media ownership in Brazil is dominated by a small number of large private companies, often family-owned. The largest is the Globo empire which includes both terrestrial and cable television, radio, internet and newspapers. This polarisation is an issue for civil society which wants more democratic access to the media and better representation of the cultural diversity of Brazil.
The inequality which marks Brazil in many other aspects is also apparent when it comes to access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, access to telephones and the internet has risen dramatically in recent years, largely as a result of privatisation of the telecommunications sector, and mobile phones are also increasingly widespread. While Brazilian users dominate on the popular social networking site Orkut, and make enthusiastic use of YouTube, around two thirds of the country's population has never accessed the internet. The north and north-east regions of the country have markedly less internet access points than the rest of the country. Community radios also continue to have a difficult existence in Brazil, with regular stories of stations being closed down by government agents and a long and bureaucratic process to secure a licence.
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| ICT learning in Brazil © Daniela Katzenstein Hart / Changemakers.net |
Under the PT, the Brazilian government has become a vocal advocate of free and open source software or software livre both nationally and internationally (though there are some inconsistencies).
The OneWorld Brazil Guide was first published in December 2004 with a text written by Volunteer Editor Tori Holmes
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