By Bianca Oliveira
“We come from a growing period of extreme poverty, unfortunately. But talking about hunger and food insecurity for millions of Brazilians is very sad for a country that has been advancing. The pandemic opened up how fragile social vulnerability is, ”says the director of operations for the social organization Gerando Falcões, Nina Rentel, in an interview to Dire news agency, about the growing situation of hunger and extreme poverty in Brazil.
With the mission of “building bridges and breaking down walls”, the NGO operates in the suburbs and slums, focused on sports and culture for children and adolescents and professional qualification for young people and adults. With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, the organization directed its focus to minimize the impacts of the crisis for people in vulnerable situations, raising money to distribute basic food baskets to community residents. In 2020, there were more than 26 million reais in donations, distributed to approximately 85 thousand families. “We work in slums that are extremely poor, that lack all kinds of services. So they are people who quickly feel the effect of measures of social distance. This second time, it was very fast that people went into a situation of very hunger and, at the same time, the escalation of donations was not so fast ”, explains Nina about the effects of the second wave of the pandemic in Brazil, which registers increasing numbers deaths since the beginning of 2021.
According to the National Survey on Food Insecurity in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Brazil, carried out by the Brazilian Network for Research in Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security (Rede Pensam), 19 million Brazilians went hungry in the last months of last year and 55, 2% of households in the country faced some degree of food insecurity. For the director of operations at Gerando Falcões, it is essential to unite the different actors in society to face this problem. “Social inequality is something that prevents the entire country from being able to develop fully.