The recent Plan 2024/2025 has become the new point of discord between right and left-wing positions. In parallel, sectors from right to left see an opportunity to drive false narratives in messenger groups.
In recent days, the minister has announced that he will release $ 4 billion in extraordinary credit to resume the plan financing, an initiative that seeks to alleviate possible damage to agricultural production.
However, even before the announcement occurs, messages on the subject were already circulating in public groups of and Telegram. The Palver platform, which monitors more than 100,000 of these groups, has detected introduction of new narrative lines that focus on two dominant and antagonistic nuclei.
On the one hand, Bolsonarist groups interpret the crop’s stoppage as part of a deliberate government conspiracy to “sabotage” agribusiness. Inflamed messages maintain that the intention would be to destabilize the production chain of grain, animal proteins, and other essential products for the basic basket, feeding a purposeful inflation scenario that would “blame” the farmers themselves.
These messages omit the budgetary reasons that culminated in the suspension of transfers and ignore external factors, such as the rise of and the global scenario of scarcity and inputs. This narrative line unfolds into the idea that the government seeks to produce “hunger planned” to create a dependence of the population in welfare policies and fosters conspiracy theories that parallel with saying that the government seeks to follow a model of “social control by hunger “.
At the other end, leftist militants share videos that show tomatoes, onions and various foods being discarded in landfills or dirt roads, stating that agribusiness prefers to throw away the products to sell them for more affordable values. According to this narrative, the purposeful destruction of food would be a mechanism of speculation, whose purpose is to maintain high prices and press the government to grant tax incentives or subsidized credits.
Verifications conducted by independent agencies reveal that many of these videos are old, captured in surface contexts or logistics problems, and do not reflect the current scenario. Still, the images spread rapidly, accompanied by speeches that accuse producers to feed inflation for political reasons.
This scenario shows how the dissemination of false information has become one of the main tools for political mobilization. On the one hand, spread the idea of ”planned hunger,” Bolsonarist groups create the feeling of fear and reinforce the idea that food inflation results from Planalto’s agenda. On the other hand, the left discloses the idea that farmers seek to influence price dynamics from political interests.
The result is a disconnected debate that occurs simultaneously in parallel realities. Little is discussed about the real causes and problems to be faced to mitigate food. Disinformation, therefore, finds fertile ground to prosper, stimulating the division between “us” and “them” and preventing real solutions from the food price problem.
Beyond conspiring or blaming the other side, facing inflation on the dish of Brazilians requires a joint effort that undergoes transparency and producer support policies that do not confuse themselves with arbitrary advantages. After all, the real enemy is not this or that group, but the informational confusion that prevents the search for concrete solutions to the well-being of the entire population.
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