Fast-growing Brazil tries to lift its poorest

The industrial complex and port here is a showcase of the region’s
economic might, employing 55,000 workers and attracting billions in
investments. But a couple of miles down the road, Netildes Delvina
Soares, 47, lives “with much suffering,” as she put it, in a wood-plank
hut without plumbing or electricity.

Though traditionally poor, Brazil’s northeast is now home to the
country’s fastest growing regional economy, making the disparity
between prosperity and extreme poverty more visible than anywhere else.
And it is here where the country’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, has
set her sights on an ambitious goal: eradicating indigence, defined as
those earning less than $45 a month.

Over the past decade, Brazil has lifted 20 million people out of poverty through a mix of well-funded social programs and careful economic stewardship, creating a burgeoning consumer class that has helped make the country the world’s seventh-largest economy.

Now, what Rousseff called her administration’s “most obstinate fight” will be to eradicate extreme poverty, which affects more than 16 million people, by 2014 . “There is still poverty that shames our country, and prevents our full affirmation as a developed people,” Rousseff, 63, said at her Jan. 1 inauguration, in which she succeeded her mentor, the popular Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Government officials say in the coming weeks she will lay out details of a broad initiative, “Brazil Without Poverty,” which expands health, education and cash-transfer programs and directs increased development aid to poverty-stricken regions.

“These are strategic decisions for the redistributing wealth, promoting big works in regions where poverty was concentrated, Tereza Campello, minister of social development, said in an interview.

Much of the assistance will be funneled to the vast north, much of it Amazonia, and here to the densely populated northeast, regions where 75 percent of Brazilians falling below the extreme poverty line reside.

It is in the northeast where poverty’s reach has been most extensive and intractable, which historians attribute to arid conditions and the legacy of slavery. The nine northeastern states contain 27 percent of Brazil’s 192 million people but account for just 13 percent of its economic growth, said Paulo Guimaraes, regional chief of BNDES, Brazil’s development bank. In contrast, the southeast, rich in industry, churns out 56 percent of the country’s economic output with just 41 percent of the population.

Guimaraes said the poverty is also deeply entrenched, from isolated peasant hamlets in the interior to the slums of the region’s bustling cities.

“Some people here don’t even have an I.D. card,” Guimaraes said. “They are invisible.”

Mara Maria da Silva, 58, is among the poorest, living in a squatter community. Her home is a shack a hillside in Cabo de Santo Agostinho, sandwiched between the vast Suape port and industrial park and Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state. She laments her own predicament, but worries most about children growing up in abject poverty, using drugs and sleeping in the open air.