We had Fome Zero (zero hunger) in Brazil, presently Bolsa Família, basically money for the bottom of society. It is a huge success in reducing suffering and improving so many other social programs as well as stimulating the overall economy. Could we think of it on a world scale?

I remember participating in the first meetings, in 2002, at the Instituto Lula, preparing for what would become the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program. It seemed hugely ambitious, getting money to the bottom of society was so out of reach. I had participated in first attempts in the 1990’s with Ruth Cardoso in the former Comunidade Solidária discussions. With Lula elected, his first priority, making sure everyone could enjoy three meals a day, in particular the children, took off with surprising power.

Getting money for basic needs at the bottom of society is impressively cheap, costing at the time about 0,5% of GDP and dramatically reducing suffering of the poor. With the condition they kept their children in school and vaccinated, it generated a huge improvement in the quality of life of a great part of society and represented an investment in the country’s future, not “costs” as the opposition claimed. In ten years, a so deeply unequal country as Brazil was taken out of FAO hunger statistics. Presently called Bolsa Família, it still is a key program of the third Lula administration. The costs in 2024 are around 1.5% of GDP. Tax evasion, mainly by the rich, is 6% of GDP, tax exemptions 5%, also for the rich.1

The ongoing success must not let us forget the massive attacks at the time. One was that if the poor received free money, they would not work, natural laziness would take over. What happened was the reverse, taken out of desperate conditions, they moved out of what the World Bank calls the “poverty trap”. Particularly strong at the time was the moral argument that receiving something from society for free was a shame—you had to battle for it. What the rich or well-off seem to forget is that the economy is a social construct and free access to public goods and services, which represent over a third of the family economic well-being, is already a fact.

People hate taxes but love having a well-kept street and free university for their kids. Basic income is just a complement. And what is particularly important is that it is not a drain on the economy—the poor do not place their money in financial papers or send it to tax havens, they spend it, stimulating demand and the overall economy. In Brazil, we have calculated that one real invested in Bolsa Família generates a 1.78 real increase in GDP, but the rich call it an “expenditure”, while the money they extract from the real economy and transform into financial rent they call “investment”. Economics became a justification narrative.

Money at the bottom of society works. Can we think of building a world-scale Bolsa Família? The North-South program drawn-up in 1980, also called the Brandt Report, presented the main lines of what an inclusive development on the global scale could look like.2 We did move on since, with the Rio-1992 global summit and so many reports, leading up to the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, the 2030 Agenda. We certainly have the financial resources to make it work but not the political will. The Agenda was supposed to make sure that we could transfer 100 billion dollars so that poorer countries could fight climate change. We never reached this sum, while the estimated 20 trillion dollars in tax havens represent 200 times as much. Just rich money. The rich hate taxes, but the poor pay them included in the price of what they purchase. Thus, the problem is not lacking the money, but getting to it and making it useful.

We do have global reference points. We know that we are going down the drain—to avoid the global catastrophe, we must build a society that is not only economically viable but also socially fair and environmentally sustainable. It is a necessity and not an option. A second point of reference is that what we produce in goods and services, the global GDP, is reaching 110 trillion dollars in 2024, amounting to an overall GDP per capita of $13,750. This is a mysterious figure for non-economists, but you can bring it down to Earth: it is equivalent to $4,600 dollars per month per four-member family. What we produce is largely enough for everyone to live in comfort, leading a flourishing life, as Tom Malleson puts it. Our problem is not economic but of social and political organisation.

A third point is that if we take the fortunes of the top 1% of the richest adults—basically financial speculative money, a total of around 240 trillion dollars—with a 2% tax you could double the wealth of the bottom half of the population, estimated at just 5 trillion. Yes, inequality has exploded, and it is killing us. Since financial fortunes are paid around 7 to 9% a year, they would still be growing richer. The 2% tax on these fortunes is being discussed in all global meetings, particularly with the Zucman report, trying to build sufficient political clout. (Le Monde, June 30, 2024)

In the years I spent in poor countries, of which 7 in Africa organising development programs, I faced the obvious absurdity of ODA (Official Development Aid) being transferred to governments—not to persons—which used it in great part to pay the growing interest rate on their foreign debt. The "aid" hardly left the countries of origin, and the "aid" was also linked to purchases in the countries of origin. I remember France helping an African government if it agreed to buy French fishing boats of which at the time they had a surplus. The money would stay in France, and the fishing boats was a French choice. Sweden was one of the few countries that allowed us to use the money for what we needed and from any country. Money going directly to the population is different.

The huge advantage we presently have is that it is possible to transfer virtual money directly to the most needed. We have huge amounts of unproductive money stagnating at the top, and huge necessities at the bottom, and we have the global connectivity, easy financial transfer systems—even for very small amounts. The digital revolution is not only for the Musks and Zuckerbergs, it can be used for a network-based social and economic transformation. With the years of experience and the scale of operations in Brazil, we have the necessary know-how and many lessons to bring.

For example, as Yunus learned it with the Grameen Bank experience in Bangladesh and other countries, channeling the money directly to women is much more productive in terms of how they use it compared to leaving it to men. It was also the Brazilian option. Organising a solid register (Cadastro Único) of social information in Brazil became useful for other social programs as well, in health, education, security, and other services. It also led us to discover a great number of totally unregistered individuals, lacking even a birth certificate—the marginalised social strata. Trickling money down to where it is needed thus rationalised a series of wider social programs improving overall systemic productivity. This is the real trickling down, not the neoliberal narrative. It reduced poverty and stimulated growth: GDP grew 3.8% a year during the Lula first administrations. The World Bank called the 2003-2013period “the golden decade of Brazil”.

Globally, we have the resources, the technology—we know what has to be done—and the reverse happens: money is going to the top more than ever and the technology is used for global power and manipulation as well as for global financial speculation. The political motivation has been captured at the top. The climate change dramas are hitting us in the face, or at least in our screens, but social inequality seems less dramatic, and the poor seem invisible. I would suggest that the way Lula started with hunger and deep poverty as the most pressing reason for change, could be the way out, on a global scale. The 17 SDG goals represent the full program—what we have to do—but a global fight to reduce hunger may be an overall starter for things to move. A simple and powerful motivation populations can identify with.

People frequently do not realise the dimension of the absurdity. The world presently produces enough food for 12 billion, 50% more than the present population. If we take grain alone, we produce more than a kilo per person per day. A normal daily dose of rice, for example, is 180 grams per adult. The waste of food is around 30%, basically through mismanagement. In Brazil, as a result of the recent far-right governments (Temer and Bolsonaro), hunger is back: for a population of 203 million, we presently have hunger hitting 33 million persons, while 125 million are in food insecurity situation, not knowing tomorrow. But taking grain alone, we produce the equivalent of over 4 kilos per person per day, basically for export, in the alliance between local agribusiness and ABCD (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Dreyfus) the major world commodity speculators. Hunger in Brazil is an absurdity. The “agronegócio” corporations prefer producing soy for export than rice for the population. In his third term, Lula has started the fight again.

And he has presently brought it as a world-scale challenge. In the G20 and COP meetings, both the taxes on billionaires and the hunger issue are on the table. Both are obvious necessities, and the result will be making speculative money useful, and the suffering of the poor reduced, besides stimulating the economy on both sides. Taxing financial rent suggests the billionaires could do something useful with their money, while improving purchasing power of the poor generates demand. North-South again. This is not wishful thinking, it is the way out.

Hunger of course is not the only issue, but it is a mobilising one. The present statistics show we have 750 million going hungry, and over 2 billion in food insecurity. This means we have nearly 200 million children suffering from hunger and millions dying from it. We do not kill them, we just let them die. Beyond the obvious drama and shocking suffering this represents, mobilising resources to face it tends to have a spreading effect on so many other of the SDGs, whether economic, social, or environmental. It is a mobilising issue. I am sick of these messages on TV, of how we could help a hungry child in some refugee camp with a few dollars. Being reduced to this level of indifference is bestiality, when we perfectly know that the solutions must be systemic, involving governments, the international organisations, and NGOs—placing hunger in the face of plenty, and particularly the millions of suffering children, as a world-scale priority.

An economic, social, political, and moral issue? Certainly. How can we tolerate children dying of hunger? It is not only immoral, but it is stupid. Tom Malleson states it clearly: “The ultimate and fundamental reason why economic inequality is wrong is that human beings are of equal moral worth and therefore should be equally entitled to access the material conditions necessary for living a good or flourishing life.”3

Notes

1 IMF, World Economic Outlook, 2022.
2 Brandt Report, North-South: a program for survival, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1980.
3 Tom Malleson, Against Inequality, Oxford University Press, 2023.