“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
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More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget. Above, fresh passion fruit juice and salad as part of a school lunch.
Photo by Leah Rimkus |
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.
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The city of Belo Horizonte puts “Direct From the Country” farmer produce stands throughout busy downtown areas.
Photo by Leah Rimkus |
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.
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ABC bulk produce markets stock the items that the city determines will be sold at a fixed price, about 13 cents per pound.
Photo by Leah Rimkus |
“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.
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The line for one of three “People’s Restaurants” a half hour before opening time. Meals cost about 50 cents; diners come from all socio-economic groups.
Photo by Leah Rimkus |
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.
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Frances Moore Lappé |
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.
YES! Magazine