Hunger In G20 Host Brazil Is Lula's Unfinished Fight

In Neide Fernandes's fridge there is no meat, no vegetables, but there are some 20 eggs -- "the least expensive" animal protein she can afford.

The 60-year-old former cashier lives with her husband and two adolescent grandchildren in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a Rio de Janeiro squat.

The building was once a hotel in the city center. Now, naked electric wires run the length of its dark corridors.

"We don't have the money for three real meals a day," she said. Her family is among the 40 million Brazilians facing what the United Nations calls "food insecurity."

Hunger still stalks Brazil, Latin America's biggest economy, even if efforts have picked up to halt it.

The issue may seem counterintuitive for an agricultural powerhouse. But the lucrative side of Brazil's farming sector is soy and sugar exports, and not diet staples such as beans and rice.

Left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made the fight against hunger a centerpiece of his mandate. The progress he has made will buoy his inauguration Monday of a "Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty" at the G20 summit in Rio.

Since her husband became jobless eight years ago, Neide Fernandes has benefited from the Bolsa Familia, a welfare program championed by Lula that gives payments to families which ensure their children attend school.

"But with 600 reais (around $100) a month, we get almost nothing at the supermarket," she said.

In the last presidential election in 2022, Fernandes voted without hesitation for Lula, whose ambitious social programs lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty during his first two mandates, from 2003 to 2010.

Returned to power, Lula brought back the Bolsa Familia. But Fernandes was disappointed more was not done.

"I thought he'd go further, but in the end I don't really feel that things have gotten better," she said.

Another Brazilian receiving Bolsa Familia payments, Alia Martins, 36, still backed Lula, whose own rise from poverty through metalworking jobs and trade unionism gave him appeal to the country's poorer classes.

"We know his history, he also knew hunger, and he has really made a difference," said Martins, mother of three children and pregnant with a fourth.

Nevertheless, she was lining up for a charity food basket in a Rio neighborhood nestled under a favela.

According to the UN State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, the number of Brazilians suffering moderate to severe food insecurity fell from 70.3 million to 39.7 million between the 2020-2022 period to the latest, covering 2021-2023.

The number of those with severe food insecurity dropped 85 percent last year compared to 2022, according to UN figures Lula's government says it has obtained. That was a reduction from 17.2 million people to 2.5 million.

"We are seeing a sharp drop, but that doesn't mean that the problem of hunger in Brazil is solved, far from it," said Rodrigo Afonso, head of the Acao da Cidadania (Citizen Action) charity distributing food baskets.

It was at Acao da Cidadania's headquarters that Lula in July unveiled his alliance against hunger and poverty initiative.

At that event, tears filled his eyes as he urged action against hunger, which he called "the most degrading of human deprivations, an attack on life, an assault on freedom."

The alliance seeks to rally countries and international bodies to finance the fight against hunger, and to copy successful initiatives.

For Marcelo Neri, head of the social studies unit of Brazil's Getulio Vargas Foundation think tank, the Bolsa Familia could be one such example. Another is a Brazilian program providing free school meals.

But Brazil is struggling with those programs' costs.

Unlike his first two mandates, when a resource boom filled state coffers, Lula is today confronted with budget pressures that he has to juggle against his ambition to lead the fight against hunger.