President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) vetoed this Wednesday (10) the readjustment approved by the National Congress of the amount passed on to states and municipalities for school meals.
Currently, the federal government transfers only BRL 0.36 for the purchase of food for each elementary and high school student and BRL 0.53 per student enrolled in preschool.
The values ​​have not been updated since 2017, a situation that has become even more serious given the recent explosion in food prices. As a result, the quality of the meal offered by public schools, often the only one that many children and young people have access to in Brazil, has deteriorated.
The increase in the amount was approved by the National Congress and included in the LDO (Budget Directive Law).
The text provided for the adjustment, based on inflation, of the budget of Pnae (National School Feeding Program), which benefits the more than 35 million enrolled in public institutions in Brazil.
The program, which is the only one of the federal government focused on school feeding, suffered a reduction of 20% in real values ​​in the budget between 2014 and 2019.
This year, strategic due to the nutritional loss caused by the two years of school closures in the pandemic, the budget was reduced to R$ 3.96 billion, compared to R$ 4.06 billion in 2021.
In the reasons for the veto, Bolsonaro said that the readjustment “contraries the public interest” because it would cause “an increase in budget rigidity”, taking away from the federal government the flexibility to allocate resources. He also justified that he would “burden” the other budgets of the Ministry of Education and other Union bodies.
If Bolsonaro had not vetoed the readjustment, the estimate was that the school feeding program would have a budget increase between 34% and 40%, since the last update is from 2017, according to Pedro Vasconcelos, advocacy advisor at the Observatório da Alimentação. School and FIAN Brasil – Organization for the Human Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition.
These entities, which defended the approval of the readjustment by Congress, criticized the presidential veto: “This confirms that the president and his government are more interested in ensuring non-permanent aid, in order to obtain votes, than perennial policies to confront of hunger,” he told Sheet Mariana Santarelli, coordinator of the observatory and public policy advisor at FIAN Brasil.
She also stated that the veto “is also an attack on nutritionists, cooks, teachers and other professionals who experience daily the lack of resources to guarantee the basics of quality school meals”.
The entities mentioned the fact that today there are 33 million Brazilians going hungry. They also cited the increase in hunger in households with children under the age of 10, from 9.4% in 2020 to 18.1% in 2022.
Bolsonaro’s veto will have to be voted on by Congress and can only be overturned by an absolute majority of deputies and senators, explains Vasconcelos. There is still no forecast for the vote, which may take place before or after the elections.
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