Brazil Country Programme

Brazil is a country of continental proportions with unique ecosystems like the Amazon and the shrub-lands and wooded savanna of the Cerrado. The country's biodiversity and cultural diversity face an ever greater threat from the growing number of large-scale soybean, sugarcane and eucalyptus plantations, as well as extensive cattle farming. Over and above the environmental problems caused by extensive forest clearance, social problems too have been considerably compounded by evictions from and conflicts over land: families who have lived on their land for generations, for the most part without land titles, are being systematically evicted by large landowners and national and multinational corporations.

There are extreme social and economic disparities in Brazil. According to government data, one third of the country's 199 million inhabitants live below the poverty line. The gap between rich and poor is also bound up with regional differences and discrimination against huge swathes of the population. Sixty per cent of rural dwellers are poor. Afro-Brazilians and indigenous people in general have less educational opportunities, lower quality housing and living standards, as well as smaller incomes. One of the main reasons for hunger and poverty is the unfair distribution of land. Concentration of land in a few hands has become even more pronounced in recent years: 4.8 million Brazilian families are landless, whereas about 4,000 large landowners own over 85 million hectares. Over the past 10 years, more than one million agricultural small businesses have had to close down.

The Brazilian Government's social policies under Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousseff did indeed raise the living standards of the poorest, but the structural causes of poverty have remained largely unchanged. Implementation of the agrarian reform has all but stalled.