Trying to end hunger is a serious issue and Lula will
have to be serious about it. A campaign with a more realistic
aim might have been a better idea to kick off his presidency.

John Fitzpatrick

The beaming, benevolent face of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been plastered across front pages of newspapers, magazine covers, television screens and street hoardings since his presidential victory and he is right to smile. A year ago he had been virtually written off by most observers (including your correspondent) who thought he would gradually lose his lead in opinion polls and end up as a four-time loser heading for the history books.

However, Lula consolidated this early lead and was never seriously challenged. He won 61 percent of the votes and took every state bar one, Alagoas. His strength was built on the left-wing PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores—Workers’ Party), which he founded 20 years ago, plus an odd combination of old-style leftists and nationalists, evangelicals, influential politicians from the center and right, some with questionable backgrounds, Roman Catholics, trade unionists and even members of the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro—Party of the Democratic Brazilian Movement) which, along with the PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira—Brazilian Social Democracy Party), formed the base of his rival José Serra. The result was that for the last three months or so the outcome was never in doubt.

Although Lula faced some criticism for cuddling up to such disparate allies, the voters obviously never held it against him. The reason is clear—people voted for Lula the man, not Lula the PT candidate. Lula is a familiar face and represents change but not radical change. People want the economy to grow but they do not want the return of high inflation. They also want jobs and a better social system and a crackdown on crime. They are not interested in waving the red flag or the kind of populism which swept Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to victory, but has divided that country ever since.

Nor, despite the views of a number of uninformed Americans, do they want a Castroite regime. I know several middle-class people, whom I would have thought to be natural Serra voters, who voted for Lula. They saw nothing odd in voting for Lula as president and the PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin as state governor instead of the PT’s José Genoíno, who is extremely close to Lula.

One Brazilian observer said “Lula-ism” rather than “PT-ism” had won the day. By winning by such a huge majority Lula now has the chance to become his own man. He has a duty to cast off the PT’s old mantle and live up to the trust voters have placed in him. Immediately after Serra conceded defeat on Sunday evening, Lula said he would be the president of all Brazilians and not just PT supporters. This, of course, is standard talk from any winning candidate, but the people will expect him to abide by this pledge. Lula has already shown that he is bigger than the party by choosing as his running mate, a millionaire businessman from the evangelical PL party, against the wishes of PT stalwarts.

Like the UK’s Tony Blair, Lula can now embody the beliefs of the party and voters without being bound by them. Should anyone think this is a betrayal of one’s party and supporters let us recall the remark by Edmund Burke that he could only do his duty to his electorate if they allowed him to exercise his own conscience on the right way to tackle problems, rather than forcing him to obey their dictates.

The following day Lula made two important announcements—on ways to increase employment and a campaign to try and end hunger within a year. These allowed him to show his social credentials and tackle two major problems. However, job creation will require precisely the policies which the PT is against, such as amending the current labor law, which makes it difficult to dismiss employees and discourages hiring new staff, especially for part-time work.

The pension system, which assures a comfortable pension for millions of former public service employees, some of them in their 40s and 50s, is a scandal and huge burden on the taxpayer, which none of the presidential candidates dared address. Tax reform is also vital in lifting the burden on companies and leaving them with more of their revenues to invest in new plant and employees.

The fact that Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administrations have only been able to nibble at these reforms during eight years shows how difficult it will be to tackle them. Interest rates are among the highest in the world and credit, even at these astronomic rates, is scarce, so firms do not have the resources to invest. Let us hope Lula will tackle these stubborn problems as a way of creating new jobs rather than coming up with non-productive job creation schemes at state expense.

No-one could dispute his other priority, ending hunger but, at the same time, one cannot wonder if this project is not a little naïve. Lula may have been born in the poverty-stricken Northeast and forced to migrate to São Paulo when he was just a skinny, little boy but one look at his stocky frame tells you that it is a long time since he personally has been hungry. What does he know about hunger and what does he mean by it?

I am not trying to be obtuse here, but how does one define hunger in Brazil? The Cidania Institute, of which Lula is head, says around 60 million Brazilians are hungry and exist on an income of less than one Real (about 25 cents) a day. Will this be the criterion on which hunger is based? How will this campaign operate? Will it encourage employment opportunities so people can earn more than one Real a day or will it take the form of food shelters where hungry people can go and get fed?

Will cheap restaurants be set up offering nourishing meals for free or at subsidized prices? Will the campaign involve existing state and private charity organizations? How will the results be measured? You can be sure of one thing—one year after the campaign starts the newspapers and television will be presenting articles about families which are still hungry and have not benefited from the campaign.

Based in a huge city like São Paulo, full of supermarkets, restaurants and street stands selling cheap food like pastéis (turnovers), pão de queijo (cheese bread), kibes etc., it is difficult to believe that people are really hungry in Brazil. However, outside the big cities it is a different story.

Hunger, Tough Issue

Some years ago I spent a couple of weeks in the Pantanal, a wetland area in the Midwest bordering Bolivia and Paraguay, about half the size of France. It is a vast swamp, which floods at certain times of the year. It is a far more interesting area than the Amazon forest, which is so dense that you can hardly see the birds and animals. The Pantanal has light and greenery, streams and ox-bow lakes, wild animals and birds, like alligators, capybaras, storks and eagles, living in harmony with locally bred cattle which can spend six months of the year up to their bellies in mud and water with no ill effects.

I was based in a small town called Corumbá, which had a rundown, faded charm, a bit like Lisbon. I loved the area and although there was obvious poverty, overall it seemed a healthy, pleasant place to live. I particularly remember going on a boat trip on the river Paraguay and listening to a young crew member singing a song in which he announced that although he was proud to be a Brazilian he was even prouder to be from Corumbá.

Another time I saw a group of Brazilian cowboys, called vaqueiros, rounding up their cattle. They splashed through the swamp, whistling, shouting and cracking their whips and filled me with envy. I wished I could live such a simple life in such magnificent surroundings. The whole area seemed like a paradise. You can imagine my surprise as I was sitting on the veranda of my hotel one morning, over a generous breakfast spread of tropical fruits, ham, cheese and bread when I read in the local paper that some children had died of malnutrition on a farm only a few miles from the city.

It seemed quite unbelievable that, in the midst of this fertility and happiness, people could be dying of malnutrition. Perhaps the fact that it was a news item meant it was an unusual occurrence but perhaps not. Things got even worse when I crossed the border into Bolivia and visited a little town called Puerto Suarez, which was almost as dingy as a village I once visited in Zambia in Africa where there was virtually nothing to buy in the “shops”. One of my memories of the main street of Puerto Suarez was an undertaker’s window in which most of the caskets on sale were child-sized.

Trying to end hunger is a serious issue and Lula will have to be serious about it. A campaign with a more realistic aim might have been a better idea to kick off his presidency. This one sounds a little like the proposal put forward a couple of years ago by the PFL’s (Partido da Frente Liberal—Liberal Front Party) Antônio Carlos Magalhães to introduce a tax to end poverty. If poverty and hunger could be ended by legislation then they would have been outlawed a long time ago.

Lula has never held any senior administrative position. During his four years as a federal deputy he was impatient and unproductive. He now stands on the threshold of assuming the highest office in the land. His supporters from the PT expect a lot from him but the overwhelming majority of those who voted for him were not members of the PT and we hope Lula will remember this.

John Fitzpatrick is a Scottish journalist who first visited Brazil in 1987 and has lived in São Paulo since 1995. He writes on politics and finance and runs his own company, Celtic Comunicações—www.celt.com.br, which specializes in editorial and translation services for Brazilian and foreign clients. You can reach him at jf@celt.com.br

© John Fitzpatrick 2002

You can also read John Fitzpatrick's articles in Infobrazil, at www.infobrazil.com 

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