When speaking at the opening of the G20, this Monday (18), President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) once again praised the reduction of hunger in Brazil with the presentation of questionable numbers, according to People’s Gazette showed in an article from July this year.
According to Lula, his government has already withdrawn more than 24.5 million people in extreme poverty since the beginning of 2023. He repeated the speech that the PT governments made Brazil leave the FAO hunger map in 2014 and that the mandate of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) reversed this situation.
“We managed to leave the FAO Hunger Map in 2014, to which we returned in 2022, in a context of disarticulation of the welfare state. It was with sadness that, upon returning to government, I found a country with 33 million people In one year and eleven months, the return of these programs has already removed more than 24.5 million people from extreme poverty. By 2026, we will once again leave the Map of poverty. Hunger”, declared Lula.
The president’s announcement is based on different poll numbers. The 2023 IBGE data is compared to that of a survey conducted in 2022 by an NGO called the Brazilian Network for Research in Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security (Rede Penssan), in partnership with a research institute.
In April, the IBGE released data indicating that, in 2023, 21.6 million households were in a situation of food insecurity, with 3.2 million having severe food insecurity, the most critical stage on the scale.
The announcements were also confused with other data released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). For the international organization, there was a 9% drop in the percentage of people with so-called severe food insecurity between 2022 and 2023. Therefore, 14.7 million people would have stopped going hungry in the country.
Historically, FAO data is released for three years and is not published separately, on an annual basis. The report, which considers the period of the last three years, shows that severe food insecurity fell from 8.5%, in the 2020-2022 period, to 6.6%, in the 2021-2023 period, which corresponds to a reduction of 18.3 million to 14.3 million Brazilians in this situation. In absolute numbers, this means that 4 million emerged from severe food insecurity when comparing the two 3-year periods.
Although Lula uses the reduction of hunger as his government’s trump card, some experts say that it is still too early to attribute the data exclusively to the policies adopted since his inauguration.
Opposition criticizes Lula’s speech on hunger
Opposition deputies criticized Lula’s speech because he claimed that his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had left “33 million people hungry” in Brazil. According to deputy Rodolfo Nogueira (PL-MS), the president manipulates data to attack the previous government, while diverting attention from the failures of his own administration.
“The president clings to numbers that lack a solid basis to build a political narrative. This rhetoric is no longer convincing, especially when the government itself ignores the economic challenges that are worsening the situation of Brazilian families,” said Nogueira.
The deputy Silvia Waiapi (PL-AP) criticized Lula’s stance in using an international forum to skewer his predecessor. “It is regrettable that the president uses the G20, a space for global discussions, as a platform to attack the previous government with distorted data. Instead of blaming the past, Lula should explain why his administration has not presented effective solutions to hunger and the misery that he mentions so much”, he declared.
In the same vein, the deputy Sanderson (PL-RS) emphasized the negative impact of Lula’s speech on Brazil’s credibility. “Bringing to the G20 a speech full of unfounded accusations and cheap policies is embarrassing Brazil. The president should be presenting solutions to attract investment and combat poverty, and not trying to blame the past to justify the lack of results in the present.”
