Brazil: armed peasants confiscate 1 ton of food

We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an article published by A Nova Democracia (AND).

Between September 5 and September 6, around 100 inhabitants of Amazonas’ communities confiscated more than 1 ton of food from a raft ran aground at the river Madeira, close to the municipality of Manicoré. The case shows a case of people’s dissatisfaction, which because of the permanent hunger ended in an action done by the masses.

According to the information shared by press, the raft was from the company AC de Oliveira Navegação e Transporte LTDA and was traveling from Rondônia going to Manaus, and meanwhile it was stopped in sandbank close to the Auxiliadora district.

At that moment, the peasants who live in the area seized the ship and confiscated just food, taking with them sugar, boxes with oil, wheat flour, food portions and boxes with condensed milk. According to the sailors, many of those peasants were armed.

The persistence of hunger in the Amazonas

Data shared by the IBGE [Translator’s note: Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics] in 2020, stated that in the state of Amazonas, hunger affects close to 2.7 million people, being this state in the second worst position in the country regarding food insecurity.

This data comes from a series of researches done between 2017 and 2018. Nowadays the researches think, on this topic, that the situation might be even worse.

According to Adjalma Nogueira, one of the researchers of the IBGE, the data presented reveals a catastrophic situation regarding the reality of the local population.

“The figures show that three out of ten inhabitants of the Amazonas have deprivations of food and in some cases, they face hunger. All the percentages of the situation of food insecurity in the Amazonas are higher than the national and regional averages. The research shows that the Northern Region has the worst figures of the country”, says the researcher.

The food crisis has increased even more during the recent summer and droughts. Impulsed by the advance of the latifundium in the region, the decrease of the amount of water in the rivers has affected the income of thousands of fishermen and small producers of the state, which remain without any kind of help from the old State.