The City that Ended Hunger

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




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 Lappé
posted Feb 13, 2009


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.


The city of Belo Horizonte puts “Direct From the Country” farmer produce stands throughout busy downtown areas.
Photo by Leah Rimkus

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. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/the-city-that-ended-hunger

[Lucinda]

1. Great article. This part really hit home:

"...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.

Thanks for the post!

[bemildred]

2. You can't be rich without lots of poor people:

“Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, as if it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately on the need or desire he has for it, – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.” – John Ruskin “Unto the Last”

[truedelphi]

3. Each autumn I go out and glean.

There is almost no way to ask farmers if I can do this - the plots of land are often owned by people miles and miles from the scene of my gleaning.

On any given day, I can glean over five lbs of pears per ten minutes spent doing so.

We are not talking damaged fruit - there is so much left after the workers have gone through that I leave anything with a bruise for the birds and bugs.

I make pear cakes, and pear syrup and even pear vinegar. Plus I love plain old pears, dripping their juice as I eat them. I give some pears to neighbors and some to several elderly friends who are not able to walk around much these days.

I also give a back seat of my car full to a friend who works with her church's committee on the homeless.

However I should point out that the amount of pears rescued by me and others is probably less than one half of one percent of the crop left behind by the pickers!

[Voice for Peace]

4. k&r

[midnight]

5. Perfect of example of how to end hunger-make food a right.

[Peace Patriot]

6. Thanks for posting! Great to see human cooperation solving problems!

It's notable that this entire program, which easily and quickly wiped out hunger, costs city residents 1 penny per day. The solution was not a lot of money but rather facilitating natural cooperators--such as organic farmers--in distributing their food in the city, controlling the price of certain basic foods in the public markets that were established and creating new institutions such as low-cost restaurants. A bit of regulation and lots of facilitation toward the common goal.

Venezuela has a similar program, nationwide--government-run supermarkets where all prices are lower (and where they print the Constitution on the grocery bags!), and other community food services including low-cost restaurants (as well as a well-thought out land reform program which provides training and loans to farmers and farming co-ops and requires sustained food production for five years before the farmers earn title to the land).

Addressing poverty, at long last, is a common theme throughout the region among countries that have elected leftist governments--most of the region. Rightwing governments, not so much. In fact, the most rightwing, that is, fascist governments-- the best 'friends' of the U.S. in the region--kill advocates of the poor and the hungry, like those feeding the hungry in Belo Horizonte, kill the poor themselves in great numbers and displace millions of peasant farmers (5 million in Colombia) with state terror--the worst human displacement crisis on earth. For this, Colombia receives $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid. We shouldn't be fooled that this money is for the "war on drugs" or "fighting terrorists." It is for driving the poor from their lands, with toxic pesticide spraying, murder and oppression, giving the lands to the rich and the corrupt, and creating a slave labor pool in the urban areas for the rich to exploit. The peasant farmers can feed their families, their extended families and their communities. They have been doing so for centuries. Our U.S. corporate rulers want them addicted to McDonald's and Burger King and desperate for low-paying jobs.

The way to fight hunger is, first of all, NOT to drive peasant farmers from their lands--or, given a fait accompli, as in Venezuela, after decades of rightwing mismanagement and oppression, reversing the displacement with land reform, as much as possible.

I don't know much about the displacement of peasant farmers in Brazil. I sense that it is a complicated problem, partly because Brazil is so big, with such a variety of landscapes, economies and cultural groups. Loggers, ranchers and farmers, large and small, have been stripping the Amazon forest (which doesn't grow back) for ag uses. That is hardly a good development in the "back to the land" movement. I know that campesinos and environmentalists objected to corporate soy/corn biofuel production because it would displace food farmers and is toxic to farm workers. But I don't have a grasp of the whole problem and all of its aspects. I would guess that Brazil's leftwing government, whose president has been strongly allied with Chavez in Venezuela, in particular, and also with leftwing leaders like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, who are intimately involved with the campesino (peasant farmer) movement, would be far better on these issues than any rightwing government, and this will no doubt continue to be true of Dilma Rousseff, Lula da Silva's successor in Brazil, who has an ever more radical leftist background than da Silva. Beyond that, and the biofuels controversy (which da Silva was on the wrong side of), I don't know what the displacement and food security/food sovereignty situation is in Brazil--but this wonderful project in Belo Horizonte is certainly a good omen, and I'm glad to hear that it is spreading.

[freshwest]

7. This is so beautiful and uplifting

I will sleep better tonight.

Thanks for sharing the story and the website, both great.

[shireen]

8. powerful!

Thank you so much for posting it. My fav. quote:
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.”

[supernova]

9. Aww to late to Rec

Thank you for the beautiful article. Fitting thing this time of year too.

Oh to see the day we could try some of these ideas in this country.

[grasswire]

10. kick

yes scores again.