Global Policy Forum

By Larry Rohter

The day after he was elected president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that his administration's top priority would be to guarantee that every Brazilian could eat three meals a day. But five months after he warned that "the hungry are in a hurry" and promised immediate help, his "Zero Hunger" program has generated more controversy than results. The reasons for the delay, critics say, range from the new government's lack of administrative experience to a protracted philosophical debate that has slowed the opening of the program. Should the help be delivered as food stamps, a cash transfer or handouts of food? Should receipts be required? A single national menu or regional variations? "Society is mobilized to break this vicious circle of poverty and hunger," José Graziano, the chief of the government's new Ministry of Food Security, acknowledged in an interview here. "There is a great deal of expectation, and we are having difficulty keeping up with it."

Popular support for the program is indeed remarkably strong, with affluent neighborhoods organizing gift campaigns and large companies offering free advertising, phone lines and other services. But when newspapers recently reported that a $15,000 check that the Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen donated after appearing in a January fashion show had not yet been cashed, the program came under attack. "Bureaucracy 10, Hunger 0" read one headline. Another daily titled its report "Amateurism 1, Hunger 0."At the moment, only two towns, Guaribas and Acauí£ in the state of Piauí­, in the remote semiarid interior are taking part in a pilot version of the program, which has a budget of just over $500 million for this year. By midyear, Mr. Graziano predicted, at least 150 cities will be taking part in the program, with the number rising to 1,000 by year's end.

But the residents of one town chosen said they really needed greater access to clean water, not food. They also complained that they were allowed to spend the monthly payment only on basic foodstuffs, not on medicine, clothing, schoolbooks or other items that they might need more. "We are starting with those measures that require the smallest investment," Mr. Graziano said. "But this is a long-term program with more than 60 elements." The government seems unsure, however, of how many people it will eventually need to serve. During the campaign, Mr. da Silva spoke of more than 50 million hungry Brazilians, out of a total population of 176 million. But once he was elected, some of his advisers began using the more modest number favored by the government's statistical service, about 18 million people.

Some of the confusion may be linguistic. Brazilians tend to use a single word — fome — interchangeably to refer to hunger, malnutrition, famine and starvation. It is also not clear whether potential beneficiaries are going hungry or simply reporting low incomes, an important distinction in a country in which millions live from subsistence agriculture. The aid for hungry families has also been scaled back, reflecting the austerity measures Mr. da Silva has been forced to put into effect as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. On the campaign trail, he talked of stipends of as much as $70 a month, but the Zero Hunger effort will, at least initially, be limited to a $15 monthly payment.

In the face of the delays, Zilda Arns, director of Brazil's most successful social assistance program for needy children, affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church recently cautioned that the government "shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel." While "it is natural for people to want to present their own ideas and innovate," she said, "the good administrator knows how to look at what is already working."

But the officials running the Zero Hunger effort are uniformly critical of the efforts of the previous government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which in December were commended by the United Nations. Although Education Minister Cristovam Buarque has suggested using an existing school voucher program to administer the food benefits, the Ministry of Food Security argues that that plan and others like it are flawed. "The official registry is not reliable," said Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, a Dominican friar and senior adviser to Mr. da Silva who has been detailed to the food program. There were people on the registry who should not have been getting aid and people not on the list who should been, he said. Before Mr. Cardoso took power in 1995, "Brazil probably had three dozen hunger and nutrition programs, which were often little more than political patronage, poorly run and coordinated, with a lot of waste and incompetence," said Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development in Washington, who formerly monitored social programs in Brazil for the World Bank. "But I think that a lot got cleaned up under the Cardoso government."

Friar Christo said Zero Hunger would avoid any return to political patronage by funneling aid directly to the needy rather than through local officials. But in some areas, opposition mayors are threatening not to take part in the program, arguing that the new structure, which includes local supervisory councils, is intended to advance the interests of congressional and state deputies who belong to Mr. da Silva's governing Workers' Party. "A ministry is not the right path" because "you create one more structure and resolve nothing," Mauro Morelli, a Catholic bishop long involved in antihunger efforts, warned recently. "Without a partnership with society," he said, "government finds it difficult to escape from two terrible things: bureaucracy and corruption."

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