Lula's Brazil
35 minutes, 2004
Ref: 087tvc

The election of Luiz Ignácio "Lula" da Silva as President of Brazil two years ago created a wave of hope at home and abroad. A team from "30 Minuts" has visited the country to look at how Lula's reforms have fared. In particular, the program looks at the "End Hunger" project to see whether it has made any difference to Brazil's 44 million poor. Brazil has the greatest gulf between rich and poor of any country on earth. The government has its work cut out trying to balance economic growth against measures to bridge this enormous gap. The team visited Sao Paulo's slum districts. The city is Brazil's economic heartland and is home to 17 million people. Although NGOs and local care workers are trying to help the slum-dwellers, Sao Paulo's problems are overwhelming. Brazilia is the second city covered in the program. Here, Lula's government follows highly orthodox economic policies, favouring free enterprise. One of Brazil's success stories is Embraer, the world's fourth largest manufacturer of passenger aircraft. Lula is filmed at the presentation of the Embraer 190, which competes with the smaller Airbus and Boeing planes. But while Lula is a hit with the businessmen, he is unpopular with public sector workers protesting against spending cuts and wage freezes. The report also covers northeastern Brazil, where 22 million of the countries 44 million poor live. We visit a project where local farmers are receiving technical aid to grow ecological crops. "30 Minuts" also covers Recife on Brazil's northeastern coast, where two thirds of the region's 1.5 million inhabitants live in grinding poverty. Brasília Teimosa is the district where most of Recife's poor live, eking out a miserable existence in shacks perched precariously over the sea. The local council and the federal government are doing their best to re-house its inhabitants in new housing in another district of the city. The project is one of Lula's successes during his first two years of office.