Brazil expects agricultural output to increase seven per cent

Rio De Janerio, Dec 12 (IANS) Brazil, one of the world's top food producers, expects its cereal, legume and oilseed production to increase by 7 per cent to 314.8 million tonnes in 2025, the state-run Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) has said.

The yield of the kind this year is expected to stand at 294.3 million tonnes, down by 6.7 per cent from the previous year, the agency said.

Some 79.1 million hectares of land have been cultivated for the harvest year of 2024, while the area cultivated for 2025 may increase by 0.8 per cent to 79.8 million hectares, it said.

Earlier this month, a report detailed that a total of 8.7 million people in Brazil were lifted out of poverty in 2023, bringing the poverty rate down from 31.6 per cent in 2022 to 27.4 per cent, the lowest level since 2012.

Extreme poverty, defined as living below the line of 2.15 US dollars per day, fell from 5.9 per cent to 4.4 per cent in the same period, said the report compiled by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Brazil's Gini index, a key measure of income inequality, remained unchanged at 0.518 in 2023, the same as the previous year. However, the IBGE noted that without the support of government social programs, the Gini index would have risen from 0.518 to 0.555.

The IBGE also revealed that in 2023, 24.5 per cent of the urban population and 51 per cent of the rural population lived in households receiving social programmes benefits, with 42.7 per cent of children and adolescents aged 0 to 14 benefiting from these programmes.

Additionally, the number of young people aged 15 to 29 who were neither working nor studying dropped to its lowest level since 2012, at 10.3 million, or 21.2 per cent. Among this group, 45.2 per cent were black or mixed-race women.

The report emphasised that employment had a notable impact on poverty levels in 2023. While 14.2 per cent of employed individuals were considered poor, less than 1 per cent were extremely poor. In contrast, 14.6 per cent of the unemployed were poor, and 54.9 per cent were extremely poor.

"These figures indicate that poverty exists even among the employed, likely due to the social vulnerability of certain segments of the labour market. However, poverty and extreme poverty are less severe among workers compared to the unemployed," the IBGE said.

--IANS