By Xinhua | September 1, 2023 | 08:19
The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, launched the “Brazil Without Hunger” plan today, Thursday, with the aim of removing the country from the United Nations (UN) hunger map and reducing poverty rates and food and reduce food insecurity.
“There is nothing holier than a mother who can gather her family around a table and serve them plenty of food every day, so that people can eat until they are full, until they say they don’t want any more,” the president said at an event to present the plan in Teresina, the capital of the state of Piauí (northeast).
In this way, “people will no longer get sick, they will be much healthier, they can work and live in dignity” and that is what “Brazil Without Hunger” wants to guarantee to people, he emphasized.
He recalled that the South American country, Latin America’s leading economy, disappeared from the hunger map in 2014, but the abandonment of public policies, he argued, led to the return of hunger a few years later.
The plan, approved by the Interministerial Chamber for Food and Food Security, which includes 24 ministries, includes 80 measures and public actions to achieve almost 100 objectives, state-run Agencia Brasil reported.
As Valéria Burity, Extraordinary Secretary for the Fight against Hunger at the Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, Family and the Fight against Hunger, explained, the plan is divided into three central axes.
The first includes measures to ensure access to income and to promote citizenship and access to public social protection measures.
The second includes measures ranging from the production to consumption of adequate and healthy food, and the third refers to the mobilization of the other powers of the State, other federal units and civil society.
In 2014, Brazil left the UN hunger map but returned in subsequent years, particularly during the new coronavirus pandemic, state press reported.
Data from the global report on the state of food security and nutrition in the world, published by five specialized UN organizations, shows that one in ten Brazilians (9.9 percent) suffered from severe food insecurity between 2020 and 2022.
32.8 percent of the South American country’s population falls into the severe or moderate food insecurity category, representing 70.3 million Brazilians.
The Minister of Development and Social Assistance, Family and the Fight against Hunger, Wellington Dias, said in an interview published today by the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo that the goal of eliminating famine must be achieved in 2026.
To achieve this, the country must have less than 2.5 percent of the population chronically food insecure over a three-year period, he explained.
(Web editor: Rosa Liu, Zhao Jian)