Cash-poor riverine households in the Brazilian Amazon once able to live sustainably from hunting and fishing are going hungry as they struggle to catch enough fish to feed their families during the highwater season that runs yearly from roughly April to September, a recent study reveals.
Hunger is intensifying due to many interacting factors: as COVID-19 assails the Amazon; Jair Bolsonaro’s government shreds once effective social welfare programs and cheerleads forest destruction; and climate change-driven extreme floods and droughts are on the upswing. Experts warn that these circumstances intensify threats to food security for the poor in remote riverine communities.
With a third of households skipping meals, and a sixth not eating for a whole day during [the highwater] season, food security can be classed as severe, concluded the authors, who interviewed 556 households along 1,267 kilometers (787 miles) of river in the Brazilian states of Pará and Amazonas.
The study is the first to show that food insecurity among Amazonian ribeirinhos as riverside dwellers are called is determined by seasonal crashes in fish catch rates in combination with social inequalities and the shredding of the social welfare safety net.
Lacking sufficient fish during the flood season, many riverine families are forced to make a tough choice: travel by boat to nearby cities to restock food supplies, putting their lives at risk from the COVID-19 pandemic that has already claimed more than 7,500 lives in the 9 states comprising Legal Amazonia, or face hunger at home.
Poor families who need to retrieve welfare benefits, along with a Brazilian government-provided US$110 emergency COVID-19 stipend to buy food, also need to travel to nearby cities, according to lead author and ecologist Daniel Tregidgo.
As the pandemic has worsened, so has food insecurity, a situation exacerbated by Bolsonaro’s policies. Since coming to power in January 2019, the president has made deep cuts to social welfare and his inflammatory rhetoric has encouraged Amazon land grabbers, resulting in skyrocketing deforestation rates which have impacted biodiversity, and by extension hunting and forest food gathering.
Lauded for its efforts in eradicating hunger over the last two decades, Brazil first under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), and then under President Dilma Rousseff (20112016) saw millions pulled out of extreme poverty through government welfare programs. But many of these measures were, and continue to be, reversed, first under President Michel Temer, and more so today under Bolsonaro.
All the programs that contributed towards Brazil exiting the [UN World] Hunger Map in 2014, have been destroyed, Tereza Campello, an economist who was Brazil’s Minister of Development and Food Security from 2011 to 2016, told Mongabay in a telephone interview.
On Bolsonaro’s first day in office on January 1st, 2019, he abolished the Council for Food and Nutrition Security (CONSEA), considered a fundamental driving force in Brazil’s dramatic reduction of hunger according to a 2019 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
The extinction of CONSEA means we’re unable to monitor the [food security] situation. There is less infrastructure and less information, explained Flavia Mori Sarti, a nutritionist and economist at the University of São Paulo who specializes in studying food security. Mori Sarti added that rising deforestation has reduced biodiversity and the number of plants and animals available as food. Along the Amazon’s so-called Arc of Deforestation, a crescent-shaped region stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the border with Peru and Bolivia, vast swathes of rainforest have been replaced by commodity crops such as soy, sugar cane, corn and eucalyptus.
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