Lula recalls bone donations and says hunger is inexplicable – 03/03/2023 – Market

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) said this Friday (3) in Mato Grosso that hunger in Brazil is inexplicable and recalled scenes of families queuing to get bone donations.

The president was in Rondonópolis, one of the main agribusiness hubs in the country, to deliver 1,440 apartments at Residencial Celina Bezerra, in an act that, for politicians and ruralist leaders, was a nod to agribusiness. He was accompanied by the minister of the portfolio, Carlos Fávaro.

“It was here in this state, which is one of the biggest cattle breeders in this country, it was here in this state, which is the biggest grain producer in this country, that a woman appears at the door of a butcher shop receiving a bone to make a soup inside It is inexplicable, in a country that is the third largest producer of food on the planet, in a country that is the largest producer of animal protein in the world, for us to have 33 million people going hungry,” Lula said during the ceremony.

Dozens of people were spotted in July 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, in a queue in front of a butcher shop in the CPA 2 neighborhood, on the outskirts of Cuiabá, to try to take home pieces of bones donated there.

Still according to the president, advances in genetics and technology have made Brazil “transform into this extraordinary producing country”, but that does not prevent Brazilians from going hungry.

“Why do people starve? People starve because people don’t have money to buy the necessary food, because if these people had money, people would find food in the supermarket,” said Lula.

Faced with skyrocketing food prices, products such as broken beans, cold cuts, carcasses and chicken skin have become alternatives at points of sale on the outskirts of large cities, as shown by Folha in July 2022.

In Rio de Janeiro, for example, people were found last year looking for leftover food in a garbage truck in the central region of the city.

In the previous year, a truckload of bones and meat leftovers began to be disputed in the south zone of Rio by residents who did not have enough money to buy food.

Brazil has 33 million people going hungry, according to the 2nd National Survey on Food Insecurity in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Brazil, released in June last year. The contingent is similar to that recorded 30 years ago.

The poorest 5% of the country saw monthly household income per capita (per person) plummet to BRL 39, on average, in 2021.

The fall was 33.9% compared to the year 2020 (BRL 59). It was the most intense among the population groups investigated in a survey by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the Continuous Pnad: Yield of All Sources 2021.