Brazilians pour into cities, census shows
© 2000 Reuters
December 22, 2000
BRASILIA - Brazilians are cramming into the nation's crowded cities like never before but growth in the population, which has reached 169.5 million, is slowing, according to the first census of the world's fifth largest country in nearly a decade, released on Thursday.
More than 230,000 surveyors were dispatched across Brazil this year to gather information from the north's steamy jungles to the Pantanal wetlands and the sprawling cities of the south.
Their findings showed the population has grown to 169.5 million this year from 146.8 million in 1991, when the last census was taken, representing average yearly population growth of 1.63 percent, said planning Minister Martus Tavares.
While high compared with developed countries, that marked the lowest population growth rate in Brazil in four decades. In the 1980s there was yearly average population growth of 1.93 percent and in the 1970s the rate was 2.48 percent.
That suggests Latin America's largest country could eventually attempt to tackle one of its biggest challenges - massive growth in its sprawling urban slums in cities like Rio, where poverty, drugs and poor sanitation produce a dangerous concoction of urban violence in its famous hillside "favelas."
According to the census, 81.2 percent of Brazil's population now live in cities, versus 75.6 percent in 1991. That is high internationally, according to statistics from the UN Population Fund, which show that even in relatively overcrowded Europe only 75 percent of people live in cities.