Brazil has 28 million people living below the poverty line¹ and last year had an unemployment rate of 12.6%². Poverty eradication is a chronic challenge and essential for the achievement of sustainable development. It is worth mentioning that poverty has several dimensions: monetary, food insecurity, lack of access to basic services, low education, and personal security.

Suzano understands that it has an important role to play not only in supporting economic development but also in promoting social transformation over 200 municipalities where it operates. This is why, with civil society organizations and other agents in these locations, we create income generation programs and seek to influence processes and public policies, strengthening local sustainable businesses that are part of the culture of each region.

We used the global monetary poverty reference adopted by the World Bank and ratified by IBGE, of 5.50 USD per day or 475 BRL per month of per capita family income (2021). The calculation uses the average monthly income, understood as the total income of household residents from work and other sources of income generation, divided by the number of residents.

Expand the scope³ of our income generation programs aiming to lift people out of poverty⁴, taking into consideration the levels of economic development and social transformation achieved in the regions where we operate.

Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, we could expand our actions to generate work, income, and social action, which contributed to lifting 9,007 people out of poverty and positively impacted 21,075 people. The cumulative number of people lifted out of poverty is 11,292 since 2020 and represents a 5.7 percent advance on the commitment target. The strengthening of social organizations to enable the marketing of products from the income generation program - as well as the institutional support from Suzano to enable the receipt of resources by them and the increase in productivity - are the main factors that leveraged this result.

In 2022, we will continue working to strengthen the institutional arrangement and our income generation programs to continue lifting people out of poverty. We aim to increase by 50% the number of people benefited by income generation programs, articulating joint initiatives of public interest with strategic players in our territories of operation. To achieve this, we will continue the social programs of family and regenerative agriculture, beekeeping, handicrafts, and sustainable extractivism, and will boost collective entrepreneurship and the local sustainable businesses that have always been part of the culture of each region.