Marina Silva makes a mistake when talking about the number of people who suffer from hunger in Brazil

The Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, made a mistake when mentioning the number of people who suffer from hunger in Brazil, during the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. The minister said that “in my country, there are 120 million people who are starving”, last Monday (16). The next day, she corrected the number to 33 million Brazilians.

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However, this data, which is from a study on food insecurity in Brazil, published by the network of researchers Pensann (Rede Brasileira de Pesquisa em Soberania e Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional) in partnership with six entities and NGOs, was criticized for several dubious aspects and of the political use of the numbers presented.

The number of 33.1 million refers to what is defined by the technical term “severe food insecurity” in the Brazilian Scale of Food Insecurity (EBIA), used since 2004 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and applied in the study. But, unlike Pensann, the IBGE does not use “severe food insecurity” as a synonym for hunger.

Report by People’s Gazette brought the assessment of specialists that there was politicization in some reports, as in the study of “33 million Brazilians going hungry”. “The worst way to deal with poverty is to politicize the issue. Many governments are responsible for this state of affairs,” said Fernando Schüler, PhD in Philosophy and Master in Political Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

The manager of the IBGE’s Household Budget Survey (POF), André Martins, in 2020, defined hunger as “a situation in which at least someone went the whole day without eating food”. Severe food insecurity is a restriction of access to food “with a reduction in the amount consumed by all residents”. In households with severe food insecurity, hunger may occur, however, one is not synonymous with the other.

Recent studies have also shown that, in 2020, the proportion of Brazilians living in extreme poverty was the lowest recorded by the World Bank in its entire historical series, starting in 1981. In 2019, the number of people living below the extreme poverty line was 5.4% and in 2020 it dropped to 1.9%.

Another survey published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Panorama of Food and Nutritional Security 2022, pointed out that the prevalence of malnutrition in Brazil was less than 5% (about 4.1%). According to the survey, there would be approximately 9 million people in this condition.