Brazil

The Federative Republic of Brazil (República Federativa do Brasil in Portuguese) is the largest and most populous country in Latin America, and the fifth largest in the world. Spanning a vast area between central South America and the Atlantic Ocean, it borders Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, France (French Guiana) — every South American nation except for Ecuador and Chile. Named after brazilwood, a tree highly valued by early colonists, Brazil is home to both extensive agricultural lands and rain forests. Exploiting vast natural resources and a large labor pool, it has the biggest GDP in South America (10th in the world) and is today South America's leading economic power and a regional leader. Portuguese is the national language of Brazil.

Poverty and Lack of literacy

Brazil has currently 25 milion people living in conditions of poverty http://www.pt.org.br/assessor/pobres.htm http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/presidencia/noticias/03122002relatorio_onu.shtm. This is a chronic problem of hard solution, having its roots in slavery, delayed industrialization, desertification of the Northeast lands over the centuries (being reversed nowadays) and economic dirigism, notably in the 20th Century (including the typical relation of inequality between developed and underdeveloped countries, from which the Brazilian ruling class takes major benefits), that makes evident the simple fact that Brazil's GNP is relatively small and unfairly distributed by the State, when the country's general needs are taken into consideration.

Related Topics:
Poverty - Northeast

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This obvious gap between the rich and the poor is common in today's extremely globalized and culturally, economically interdependent world, and comes from external and internal means of exploitation (typical effects of internationalized capitalism), driven by the United States central pole of power. This problem is incredibly accentuated in Brazil: while the Brazilian rich people mantain their almost uncontested control over the State, which sees itself obliged to follow external market rules and pay the huge external debt, the privatization of State-based services advances, making it harder and harder for Brazil to assume control of it's own social disparities.

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Brazil's social conditions are opposed to one of the world's highest tax levels, which doesn't necessarily mean the money is going to be converted into aid for structural changes, capable of shifting the social condition. A myriad of private support organizations, like Rotary International and NGOs, act in the country.

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Poverty in Brazil can be seen in the large metropolitan areas cities (capitals) and in the "poverty bags" (upcountry regions with low rates of economic and social development). The Northeast has chronic problems as a result of its dry climate, with millions of people suffering hunger during the dry seasons. Mr. Da Silva's proposed a program (Fome Zero) to mitigate this problem but it has had no tangible results.

Related Topics:
Northeast - Dry - Climate - Hunger - Fome Zero

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About 8% of the Brazilian population is technically considered illiterate (analfabetos, in Portugese), although a larger percentage show little writing and computing abilities.http://www.ibge.gov.br/ibgeteen/datas/alfabetizacao/alfabetizacao.html

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