Brazil’s poverty programme brings water to the destitute

FOR generations, the women of Guaribas, Brazil, would trudge more than two miles a day to a spring, wait hours in line, occasionally quarrel when the flow dropped to a trickle, and then head home balancing buckets of water on their heads for drinking, cooking and bathing.

That ended two years ago when a water tower went up on a hill overlooking this remote outpost in Brazil’s arid and destitute north-east.

Now the water flows from taps outside people’s homes, and the only line is the one that forms at the town’s cash machine, to withdraw 65 Brazilian reals (€23.80) per family for food, courtesy of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Small but telling changes such as these, replicated across Brazil’s worst poverty belt, are the gains of a Zero Hunger revolution promised by the president — known to all as Lula — and they are helping to drive his likely re-election on October 1.

It was promises like Zero Hunger that had investors worried when Silva, a former radical union leader, was seeking to become Brazil’s first elected leftist president in 2002. Yet he is managing to deliver while embracing fiscal conservatism without raising taxes.

“Thank God for Lula,” said Isaias Conrado Alves, a rail-thin bean farmer who lost his crop to bad weather this year, but was able to feed his family with money from the programme.

Critics complain the programme isn’t reaching all who need it, and Marilia Leao, a health expert says long-term investment in health, education and sanitation “haven’t grown as much as they should have.”

“What Lula gave us is enough: Water,” Mr Alves said with a toothless grin as he turned on the tap outside his house. “This is life, my friend. Water is life.”