Brazil’s Rousseff says extreme poverty almost eradicated
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
President Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday raised the monthly stipend of 2.5 million people living below the poverty line to make good on her promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Brazil, a nation with enormous income gaps between rich and poor.
She said she has almost met her anti-poverty target halfway through her four-year term, though Brazil’s last census points to 700,000 Brazilian families who still live in extreme poverty but are not registered on government social programs.
Success in the war on poverty would garner useful political capital for a possible re-election bid by Rousseff in 2014 and compensate on the welfare front for her failure to deliver strong economic growth.
