Hunger and unemployment in Brazil have a color, according to surveys

Hunger and unemployment, which take the sleep of millions of heads of households across the country, have placed families in a vulnerable situation and helped to highlight a historic wound in Brazilian society: racial inequality.

While 59.2% of blacks have some degree of food insecurity (from mild to severe), this percentage is 51% among whites.

The numbers are in the report “Food Insecurity and Covid-19 in Brazil”, published at the beginning of the year by Rede Penssan (Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security).

The survey also points out that 43.4 million people did not have enough food and 19 million Brazilians were facing hunger. Most food insecure people are also women and have not completed high school.

Food insecurity is characterized by people’s lack of access and availability to food in sufficient quantity for survival.

In addition to the numbers, hunger has gained a face in recent months, whether in scenes starring families in search of food close to disposal in downtown São Paulo, looking for food in the garbage in Fortaleza or following the path of the bone truck in Rio de Janeiro .

In addition to a face, hunger has color, gender and address, says Maitê Gauto, Program and Incidence manager at Oxfam Brasil.

“Black women represent 27% of the population and occupy half of informal jobs, especially in domestic work. They form a highly vulnerable group, without labor guarantees and social protection,” she says.

She emphasizes that the relationship between hunger and racial inequality is straightforward. In a crisis scenario, such as that caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the black population is the first to feel and the last to recover.

“The impact of the crisis is very different between whites and blacks, men and women, rich and poor. Inequality in Brazil is built on very deep structures of Brazilian society”, says Gauto.

A resident of Colombo, in Greater Curitiba, Adriana Jesus, 48, is one of the portraits of the difficulties that black women face in the job market.

She lost her steady job as a maid at the start of the pandemic. Now, when he gets lucky, he manages to work four times a week as a day laborer and supplement his income by distributing leaflets on the street.

“I worked with a single boss for over 15 years, but they were also unemployed in the family and had to fire me. Now it’s harder to get a job and I don’t see any signs of improvement,” he says.

In the second quarter of 2021, the unemployment rate among workers identified as blacks and browns was 16.2%, while that of whites was 11.7%, according to data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), from IBGE, compiled at the request of the sheet by IDados consulting.

When looking at unemployment that has been dragging on for longer than two years, black workers also end up appearing among the highest numbers. There are 2.5 million compared to 1.4 million whites.

“The trajectory to reach the job market is usually much more difficult and full of challenges for black workers. White children are proportionally the majority in preschool, and white mothers have more opportunity to continue working, without having to face the same risks of food insecurity”, says economist Bruno Ottoni, from IDados.

He emphasizes that the position in the labor market often ends up functioning as a summary of the barriers and difficulties that workers have faced throughout their lives. Access to lower quality schools and inadequate nutrition end up perpetuating the family history.

“The implemented policies help, but they don’t solve it. Toward the end, after all, many black workers enter the labor market, after having gone through poor secondary education, coming from low-income and food-insecure families.”

Ottoni adds that one way out so that this disadvantage is not perpetuated would be to replicate successful experiences throughout the country, such as that of public schools in Ceará, which have managed to make a leap in quality in recent years.

Francisco Menezes, Policy analyst at ActionAid, recalls that it is impossible to separate the current scenario of inequality in black people’s access to better quality jobs from the slavery and colonial historical heritage, which made the emancipation process of this portion of the population more formal than effective.

“There was also a destruction of public policies aimed at food security, which were those that supported the most vulnerable population, mostly black, such as the policy of building cisterns in the semiarid region”, he says.

Analysts also point out that in a situation of unprecedented health and economic crisis and with no prospect of a very quick recovery, the actions taken by the government to reduce the impact on the poorest become even more important.

For Gauto, although emergency aid has helped many families, especially throughout 2020, some government actions have increased the feeling of insecurity, such as withdrawing the benefit at the end of last year and returning it four months later, with a lower value.

“Furthermore, inflation also has a color, as it weighs more on the poorest. From rent to cooking gas, skyrocketing prices help to perpetuate inequalities. Anyone doubts that the greater number of homeless people in the big cities Is cities also something that could be alleviated with well-formulated public policies?” she asks.