[Brazil] Poverty fight breeds hope, votes

From Reuters

VILLA DAS FLORES, Brazil, Oct 20 - (Reuters) - Marlucia da Conceicao plans to vote for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva next year after he helped alleviate her family's poverty in the scrub and cacti of Brazil's northeast badlands.

Her eleven-year-old son Sandro has become the first person in her family to read and write since Lula expanded social programs and quadrupled average benefits. The boy has not had to work in the stony fields like she did as a child.

The president's faded 2002 campaign poster hangs among images of saints and the Virgin Mary in da Conceicao's wattle-and-daub shack near Cabrobo, Pernambuco state, 780 miles

northeast of the modernist capital Brasilia.

She is among millions of poor who believe Lula, a former metalworker who grew up in poverty 200 miles east of here, kept election promises to wipe out hunger and take on centuries-old wealth inequalities.

Critics in Brazil's opposition, the private sector and aid organizations say Lula has taken credit for programs started by the former government and turned them into an expensive, corruption-prone system.

They say Lula will fail to shrink gaping inequalities unless he gets recipients off $3 billion in annual handouts and into jobs.

The poor's support for Lula could be decisive as he tries to recover from a corruption scandal before seeking possible election to another four-year term in the October 2006 presidential race.

"I didn't want my children to work in the rice fields, I wanted them to go to school and get good jobs," said da Conceicao, 38, as Sandro returned from classes. "Lula helped."

Da Conceicao is among the majority of Cabrobo county's 30,000 residents who live on about $1.50 a day and qualify for the government's Family Fund, or Bolsa Familia program.

Bolsa Familia combined four programs set up by the former government and is now the world's biggest "conditional cash transfer" program, according to the World Bank.

It demands the poor send children to school and take them for health check ups in exchange for up to 95 reais ($42) a month.

The 73 reais a month Marlucia gets cuts pressure to send her children to work when her husband cannot find $5-a-day jobs in the rice fields.

Bolsa Familia is expected to go to around 50 million of Brazil's poorest people, or over a quarter of the population, by late 2006.

POOR POWER

The program has anchored Lula's popularity among the poor after his party leaders and aides were accused in June of buying votes in Congress and illegally financing election campaigns, pollsters say.

"Social programs are going to have a big impact for Lula in the election," said Ricardo Guedes, director of the Sensus institute, one of Brazil's leading polling firms.

Some analysts fear Bolsa Familia could be used to buy votes in next year's election and Brazil needs to find a long-term solution to poverty instead of relying on handouts.

"It's an emergency plan and it has to be linked to programs that provide work," said Katia Maia, Brazil coordinator for aid agency Oxfam.

Though Brazil's economy has stabilized in recent decades, the country's wealth inequalities are the widest in Latin America and have barely budged in 50 years.

Governments traditionally earmarked social spending on pensions and unemployment benefits for politically powerful workers rather than excluded rural peasants or the urban poor.

The focus shifted in the 1990s as Brazil expanded education to give the poor skills to enter the formal economy which is showing signs of steady growth.

Around 97 percent of Brazilian children now attend school. But the low quality of schooling means most still fail to get a basic education. It will be two decades before poor black children like Sandro reach the current low national average of eight years of schooling, based on a government study.

Lula vowed to accelerate the anti-poverty fight and wipe out malnutrition in four years when he entered office.

His first plan, known as Fome Zero, or Zero Hunger, was ridiculed for handing out food to families that needed decent education and job opportunities more than beans and rice.

He fired his development minister, created a single ministry out of overlapping agencies and combined payments onto a single card to cut costs and corruption.

"The next step is to help people develop skills so they can get jobs," said Social Development Minister Patrus Ananias, a former left-wing mayor and devout Catholic.

The World Bank puts Bolsa Familia among the top 10 conditional cash-transfer programs in the developing world. It says the government has improved monitoring and cracked down on fraud in 2005.

"I think there were high expectations for this government to deliver socially and I think they have," said Kathy Lindert a senior economist at the World Bank, which loaned $572 million to help set up Bolsa Familia.

Wanda Engle, social development chief in Brazil's former government, sees nothing wrong with Lula winning votes by handing out more cash to the poor, strings attached.

She says he could change the outlook of political elites that traditionally spent money on their own classes.

"It would be great if Brazil's politicians discovered investing in the poor pays dividends," said Engle, now head of social development at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.