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This article discusses the impacts of poverty on the education of children and adolescents, analyzing the causes of social exclusion. The methodology starts from a qualitative approach, with an exploratory nature, and uses a semi-structured questionnaire to collect data from five teachers from a public school in the city of Serra, State of Espírito Santo, Brazil. As a result, it is observed that these teachers understand poverty and social exclusion as an obstacle in the education of children and adolescents and perceive the need for an effective public policy aimed at the education of the underprivileged. However, some of these professionals still didn't arise as social agents involved in this intervention, explaining in their answers that they do not see themselves intertwined with issues that go beyond the act of teaching the classic disciplinary contents, revealing themselves to be aliens to the reality of the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With many of the poor people in Brazil living in rural areas, local governments have intensified their efforts to design and implement effective policies that boost rural development. In 2004, a national program for production and use of biodiesel was launched aiming at increasing income among less endowed family farmers across the country. With expectations building on further expansion of the mandatory blending of biodiesel with fossil diesel, national and local government bodies are challenged by the search for policies able to foster biodiesel crop production through the wider cultivation of crops that produce more oil than soybean (e.g. sunflower and castor bean) and by improving the participation of less endowed farmers, especially in semi-arid regions. Therefore, the objective of this study was to perform an ex-ante integrated assessment of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of four biodiesel policy scenarios towards different farm types in a semi-arid and more humid region of southeast Brazil. The applied modelling framework was a combination of a technical coefficient generator (TechnoGIN) and a bio-economic farm model (FSSIM). We explored the impact of market-driven (bonus price policy), input provision (fertiliser and land preparation policy) and oil production (oil mill policy) policy scenarios on soybean farmers in Chapada Gaúcha and maize/beans farmers in Montes Claros. The impacts of the different policies on farm gross margins, oil crop production, labour requirements, nitrogen losses and biocide residues were assessed against the baseline scenario. Our results indicated that the scope for biodiesel crops on smallholder, non-soybean producers in Montes Claros is less evident than in Chapada Gaúcha, particularly among the less endowed farmers for whom the increase in farm gross margin in all scenarios is limited to only 6% while oil production was 140 kg per farm, which is very low compared to the 41% increase and more than 48,000 kg of oil of soybean producers. The most effective policy scenario was the provision of inputs such as fertiliser and land preparation. Because in Montes Claros farmers have limited access to fertiliser, machinery and biocides, strategies that enable farmers to increase their cropped area (i.e. land preparation policy more than doubled the crop area) and crop yield levels (i.e. fertiliser policy almost quadrupled crop yields) have highest potential to benefit these farming systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phrase persistent vulnerability reflects the enduring relationship of the rural population in Ceará with a highly variable climate. Persistence underscores the historical and unyielding nature of this vulnerability. Yet contrary to once-catastrophic rates of mortality etched in a public consciousness, no one dies from severe droughts and few people flee them as in the past. Government relief and social transfers have become the institutionalized form of adaptation, giving way to the counterintuitive reality that drought stabilizes the food and income supply for poor people. We analyze how maladaptive risk reduction, which is embedded in clientilistic social relations, undermines resilience, and we examine pathways toward a more sustainable adaptive relationship. Aplicamos o termo vulnerabilidade persistente para representar a relação duradoura entre a população rural do estado do Ceará e a quadra chuvosa altamente variável e incerto. Esta persistência se destaca na inevitabilidade histórica desta vulnerabilidade. Ao contrário das épocas de seca catastróficas bem cravadas na consciência pública do sertanejo cearense, o cenário da seca marcada de morte e fuga não existe mais. Os programas de emergência e de proteção social já se transformaram em formas institucionalizadas de adaptação, deixando transparecer a realidade irônica que a seca acarreta um período de estabilidade de alimentos e renda para a população mais necessitada. Aqui avançamos a tese que esta estratégia pública de adaptação à seca, sendo baseado num clientelismo enraizado, enfraquece a resiliência fundamental da sociedade face à mudança climática. Findamos por examinar os caminhos de adaptação mais promissores e sustentáveis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]