[Scpg] The City That Ended Hunger/A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger./By Frances Moore Lappe, YES! Magazine

Thu Nov 22 09:36:17 PST 2012

The City That Ended Hunger
By Frances Moore Lappe, YES! Magazine
22 November 12

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14662-the-city-that-ended-hunger
A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. 
cities have yet to do: end hunger.

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger 
is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But 
that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What 
does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in 
securing life's essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a 
pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 
of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered 
citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help-not 
models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For 
me, the story of Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich 
trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 
percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 
percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected 
administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, 
in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less 
a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias-now leader of the federal anti-hunger 
effort-began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 
20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church 
representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food 
system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in 
allocating municipal resources-the "participatory budgeting" that 
started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the 
first six years of Belo's food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to 
the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in 
the city's participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the 
right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers 
and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of 
public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially 
redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce-which often reached 100 
percent-to consumers and the farmers. Farmers' profits grew, since there 
was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, 
healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope's Edge 
we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, 
emblazoned with "Direct from the Countryside," grinned as she told us, 
"I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got 
this contract with the city, I've even been able to buy a truck."

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering 
that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as 
a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available 
by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use 
well-trafficked plots of city land for "ABC" markets, from the 
Portuguese acronym for "food at low prices." Today there are 34 such 
markets where the city determines a set price-about two-thirds of the 
market price-of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers 
and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market 
price.

"For ABC sellers with the best spots, there's another obligation 
attached to being able to use the city land," a former manager within 
this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. "Every weekend they have to 
drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city 
center, so everyone can get good produce."

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy 
"People's Restaurants" (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, 
that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food 
for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in 
one, we saw hundreds of diners-grandparents and newborns, young couples, 
clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street 
clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

"I've been coming here every day for five years and have gained six 
kilos," beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

"It's silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food," an 
athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. "I've 
been eating here every day for two years. It's a good way to save money 
to buy a house so I can get married," he said with a smile.

No one has to prove they're poor to eat in a People's Restaurant, 
although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases 
stigma and allows "food with dignity," say those involved.

Belo's food security initiatives also include extensive community and 
school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal 
government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, 
corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

"We're fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent 
administrator," Adriana explained. "We're showing that the state doesn't 
have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels 
for people to find solutions themselves."

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is 
working to "keep the market honest in part simply by providing 
information," Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods 
and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at 
bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people 
know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters 
to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, 
manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and 
mixed into flour for school kids' daily bread. This enriched food also 
goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy 
of the city.

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate-widely used as 
evidence of hunger-by more than half, and today these initiatives 
benefit almost 40 percent of the city's 2.5 million population. One 
six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group 
reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the 
only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. 
That's about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a "new 
social mentality"-the realization that "everyone in our city benefits if 
all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or 
education-quality food for all is a public good."

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean 
more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It 
can mean redefining the "free" in "free market" as the freedom of all to 
participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government 
partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No 
change in human nature is required! Through most of human 
evolution-except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years-Homo 
sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. 
As food sharers, "especially among unrelated individuals," humans are 
unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food 
transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. 
We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in 
the world taking this approach-food as a right of membership in the 
human family. So I asked, "When you began, did you realize how important 
what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it 
is in the entire world?"

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I 
tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our 
interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

"I knew we had so much hunger in the world," Adriana said. "But what is 
so upsetting, what I didn't know when I started this, is it's so easy. 
It's so easy to end it."

Adriana's words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold 
perhaps Belo's greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are 
willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we 
trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or 
protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners 
with government accountable to us.

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