Since April 2020, we have been watching an increase in the donation campaigns due to the serious economic crisis made worse by the pandemic, but also previous to it. The crisis is responsibility of the Bolsonaro administration, which obeys the corporate-financial power. Unfortunately, part of the Brazilian population depends on those actions to have access to basic goods, essentially food. The donations have been fundamental, but as usual, it is necessary to differentiate charity and marketing slogans from real solidarity. There are campaigns promoted by the mass media, supermarket chains, and actions of solidarity organised by popular organisations and movements.
In the first place, considering the deep economic crisis which sweeps the country, one of the main duties of the big companies, the hegemonic media and even agribusiness is to pay their debts to the State so that it can carry out the policies necessary to fight the pandemic and the impacts of historical unemployment levels. The TV channel SBT has, according to the Attorney General of the National Treasury, a debt of R$ 97.2 million with the Federal Government. Luciano Hang, owner of the self-called “giant of retail” Havan, and one of the businessmen who defends the Bolsonaro administration more ardently, has evaded since 2013, according to the Federal Revenue department’s report last year, almost R$ 2.5 million in taxes. Until last year the rural lobby, through the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock, had been trying to legalise bad debts of more than R$ 34 billion to the Federal Government related to the Fund for Assistance to Rural Workers (Funrural), i.e., also due taxes.
In Havan’s case, that company boasts an action through which it raised exactly the quantity of R$ 2.5 million only in 2020. The campaign Solidary Change is the typical supermarket campaign in which the protagonists of the donations are the people, not the company. Corporate power increases as the State allows bad debts, and does not have the resources which belong to it available, allowing that in cases like this, which are not isolated, charity (with someone else’s money) falsely take the place of public policies. And the whole process still serves as an “ethical makeup” for companies which do not respect the labour rights of their employees.
Along with many popular movements, we from Friends of the Earth make part of a front precisely to denounce those false solidary actions coming from companies. During the pandemic, those popular movements and organisations have been confirming the popular saying that the ones who have less, help more. That is class solidarity. Only in 2020, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) donated 4 thousand tons of food and 700 thousand take-aways to families of workers in situation of social vulnerability. The Homeless Workers Movement created the Solidary Kitchens in many states in the country, and the Homeless Solidarity Fund, which made possible the donation of food parcels and hygiene products, and to help women in a situation of violence, a reality which got much worse during the pandemic. The national trade union centres have also created solidary actions to donate baskets with food or basic goods like kitchen gas, in the case of the actions organised by petrol workers.
This year, the Black Coalition for Rights launched the campaign People are hungry, along with other entities, aiming to donate food parcels to more than 220 families which live in poor areas, favelas, stilt houses, riverside communities and quilombos all over the country. The black population has not only been the most affected by hunger and poverty, but also the most impacted by coronavirus.
The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples from Brazil (Apib), with populations hugely impacted by the pandemic, has also created a combat front against the pandemic called Indigenous Emergency which, with the omission and misinformation campaign of the federal government, has been installing their own sanitary barriers in the communities in order to avoid contamination, besides having to lead informative campaigns to fight fake news about the pandemic. LGBT organisations have been organising all over the country actions like chipping-ins, donation of food parcels, juridical assistance and medical care.
Many of those actions are performed in a network among all those movements, unions and articulations. As Friends of the Earth, we make part of that network of popular solidarity, enlarged during the pandemic, for example, by Popular Feminism Alliance and solidarity actions with the Guarani communities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. It is important to emphasise that, differently from the ethical makeup of the big companies during the pandemic, the solidarity actions of popular movements have an explicit political character, and they denounce not only the impacts of coronavirus, but all the backward steps that the Bolsonaro administration has been taking in all possible areas: against indigenous people, black people, women, quilombolas, workers, LGBTQIA+ and against the common goods and territories where they inhabit.
We talk more about this issue in the text Solidarity network to build another reality! In the publication From the countryside to the city: stories of struggle for the right of people to land and life. See the work here.
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