Brazil's new leader shelves warplanes to feed hungry

Brazil's new leftwing president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, signalled the seriousness of his fight against poverty yesterday when he delayed an important arms deal so that he could spend the money on an anti-hunger campaign.

Two days after he was inaugurated as the leader of Latin America's largest country, the man known universally as Lula held his first cabinet meeting and reaffirmed that his government would make social programmes a priority.

The defence minister, Jose Viegas, announced that the previous administration's proposals to modernise the air force with the £450m purchase of 12 fighter jets would be put on hold for a year.

"Funding social projects is more important in Brazil right now," he said. "But this doesn't mean that the purchase will be abandoned. The president has said he holds the armed forces in high esteem."

In his inaugural address, Lula said his initial objective was to end hunger among the country's estimated 54 million poor, 24 million of whom live on less than $1 a day. He has said that he will have fulfilled his life's mission if by the end of his four-year mandate every Brazilian can afford three meals a day.

The political scientist Jairo Nicolau said: "I think the decision is more symbolic than effective. The amount of money involved is not very much for the scale of what he wants to do."

Lula, who is Brazil's first working class president, was brought up in poverty in Brazil's semi-arid north-east. His Zero Hunger project has already become the main plank of his programme, and next week he will lead a delegation of ministers on a three-day visit to some of the north-east's most impoverished areas.

Despite the country's precarious economic situation, polls show that Brazilians have higher levels of optimism about Lula than they had about any of the four other elected governments since the end of the 1964-85 dictatorship.

The jet deal was part of a £2.1bn plan in 2000, to update Brazil's ageing air force. The contract aimed to shore up surveillance of Brazil's vast and porous Amazonian border to prevent incursions by Colombian rebels, and the smuggling of drugs, weapons and timber.

Most of Brazil's 60 current fighters - American-built F-5s and French-built Mirages - were bought in the 1970s and are outdated compared to those in the air forces of Brazil's neighbours, according to John Shields, an expert on South American defence and political affairs.

The Brazilian contract would be the largest purchase of fighters by any Latin American country in two decades. Mr Viegas said the government might consider alternatives, such as renting planes or buying used jets instead.

Last week Mr Viegas said that Lula wanted the military to provide planes, equipment and soldiers to help in the anti-hunger campaign.

The military's £4.6bn budget is scheduled to be cut by £177m in 2003. Last year the army discharged 45,000 recruits four months early because there was not enough money to feed and clothe them.

The international markets did not appear to worry that the government's priorities had shifted towards more social projects. The embattled Brazilian real rallied nearly 3% as investors bet that Lula's team would pursue sound economic policies.