This story needs to be told over and over again. It applies
everywhere and tells one key lesson. It is easy and merely needs
will. Suppliers will cooperate with a clear set of rules to work
from which the government supplies.
Twenty separate products are supplied at an attractive price to the
consumer as a form of rent for space usage. That alone will go far
to ensuring proper food security.
When the market place is peddling potatoes at several different
prices around a half dollar, you can be sure that the grower is
receiving the same dime a pound for everything. That same grower is
happy to sell at twenty cents a pond in order to truck it all into
town to move his produce. He already has the truck.
The big lesson is that a city can mandate and incentivise this
outcome in such a way that all eat and all eat well. Those twenty
staple are certainly the core of an excellent diet.
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
“To search for
solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status
of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”
CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL
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.
“I knew we had so
much hunger in the world. 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.”
The result of these
and other related innovations?
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.
Frances Moore Lappé
wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009
issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including
Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food
First and the Small Planet Institute, and a YES!
contributing editor.
The author thanks Dr.
M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article.
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