Fiscal adjustment, pandemic and regional inequalities

an analysis of the social determinants of the "same Severe Severino death" in Brazil’s Northeast (2016 to 2022)

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the implications of the ultra-neoliberal fiscal adjustment for the worsening levels of food insecurity in the Northeast Region of Brazil between 2016 and 2022. To this end, a bibliographic and documentary study was carried out, including a literature review to understand the determining factors in the historical context and to deepen the analytical categories, as well as a collection of documentary information from secondary sources, with reference to indicators of regional inequality and food insecurity in Brazil. The bibliographical research allowed us to understand the issue of hunger in the Brazilian and the Brazilian Northeastern reality in a critical way, as a political phenomenon: it is the most serious expression of social inequality, which takes on the historical outlines of a structural calamity in the face of regional inequalities in Brazil. Thus, in the 21st century, two political movements stood out in Brazil: the first was characterized by attempts to tackle regional inequalities and the fight against hunger, which had a greater impact in the Northeast region until 2014; and the second was characterized by a sharp retraction of these public policies from 2016 onwards, with the deepening of the fiscal adjustment. These latest measures have contributed to the worsening of food and nutritional insecurity in Brazil and its Northeast region, amplifying the social and health crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, which occurred between 2020 and 2022. In this way, it is possible to grasp the structural determinants of the reproduction of real scenarios' "same Severe Severino death" (“mesma morte Severina”), as the author João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote.