Brazil

Apologies for the late posting.

The following chapter covers another example of urban successes dealing with food and sustainability of cities. Brazil has implemented nation policies to reallocate distribution of food so as to end hunger, giving impoverished city people access to quality, locally grown food at a price even they can afford. What started as a local undertaking in the city of Belo Horizonte, has become national policy. And this happened without a crisis. What would need to happen in the US to implement such policies here?

A change in our society. A change in our perception of how our society works. And most of all, a change within ourselves.

Brazil

Belo Horizonte, a city of 2.5 million people has ended hunger without a major crisis to spur its government into action. The government did it on its own.

In 1993, a new mayor, Patrus Ananias, declared food as a right of the citizenship. His administration went further and said that if you, the citizen, are too poor to buy food in the market you are no less a citizen and that they, the government officials, are still accountable to you. Where in our culture and country do public officials say these things or make such pronouncements and then actually act on them?

Belo’s population already participated directly in government by being part of a “participatory budgeting” process. By directly overseeing how the officials spent the city’s money, the involved populace was a check and balance that made the new food policies possible. Within the first six years Belo’s food-as-a-right policies were enacted, more than 31,000 people began participating in the budgeting process. A doubling from before the policies were enacted. People were interested.

Under the new policies, farmers gained choice spots within the city to sell their produce directly to the population. The farmers were not exploited by a for-profit system of food distribution.  The producers of the city’s food benefited directly from their labor.

The new city policies created ABC markets. ABC is a Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”. The market owners could set up shop in the best spots in the city and sell produce at market prices, but they had to sell about twenty healthy items at only two thirds the going rate. Another thing the government had the market owners do to give back to the community from which they made their profits, was to drive produce trucks every weekend to poorer areas of the city which did not get the benefit of affordable markets.

The mayor’s policies also benefited the children in the schools. Federal money that was once used to buy corporate, processed food went to buy local, whole food for school lunches. The policies created extensive community and school gardens. The policies also created three large and several small restaurants called “Restaurante Popular” or, “People’s Restaurants”. They serve mostly locally grown food at around fifty cents per meal. Eighty five percent of the People’s Restaurant’s patrons are low income but no one has to prove they are poor to eat there. There are no strings attached. People have retained their dignity.

Another way that the government is working for the people is to have transparent pricing in the marketplace. In cooperation with a local university a price survey of forty five basic foods and household items is done at dozens of shops. This survey is posted online, at bus stops, on television, on radio shows and in newspapers. In this way the market is kept honest and people know where the cheapest prices are for the things they need most.

Belo Horizonte’s hunger ending initiatives cost the city two percent of its budget. The government in Belo fought to show that the state is not a terrible and incompetent administrator. They are showing that the state does not have to provide everything, only to facilitate. Now, the initiatives of the Patrus Ananias administration have evolved into a federal program that is helping to end hunger in Brazil as a whole. Given time, this may succeed.

In the U.S. watchdog groups uncover price fixing and manipulation. Watchdog groups uncover questionable food practices and ingredient use.  These watchdog groups are an outgrowth from a system that refuses to be held accountable to the general public it is supposed to serve. What if Belo Horizonte’s system was adopted for ingredient sourcing? For farm practices? What if mandatory labeling of GMO, GEO, irradiated, cloned, nano-modified or enhanced food and products existed? Corporations say changing their labels is too expensive. However, label changes are routine. A new look, a new ingredient added, a special run of a product during a holiday, are types of changes that occur throughout the year. Not being able to place some kind of a designation on their labels due to expense is a flimsy excuse at best, but an excuse that was considered good enough to stifle resistance. We need to not be so accepting of excuses.

To end hunger in our cities is easy. It takes the will of the governed as well as the government. It takes time. It takes knowledge and work. But it does not take as much money as people think. Relative to the cost of a military weapons system

it takes very little money

indeed.