In the southeast of Brazil, a few hundred km from the major cities
of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the municipal government
of Belo Horizonte has presided over sustained improvements in
nutrition and food security for its 3 million citizens for over a decade.
Created in 1993, the Adjunct Municipal Secretariat of Food
Security has developed programs which promote food security
within the city, and which show promise as a model for improving
rural livelihoods. Over the 13 years of the Secretariat’s existence,
millions of citizens have participated in their programs,
thousands of jobs have been created, and consumption of fruits
and vegetables has increased in the greater municipal area while
it has decreased in other major Brazilian metropolises, and infant
mortality, often attributable in large part to malnutrition, has fallen
by over 41%. Indeed, the United Nations has declared Belo Horizonte
a “model city” for progress that meets and in many cases
exceeds the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (Diário Oficial
do Município, Belo Horizonte, Ano XII, Nº: 2.578, 04/01/2006).
Belo Horizonte, the capital of Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, initiated
its city-wide food security program in 1993 under the leadership
of its then Mayor at the time, Workers’ Party member Patrus
Ananias de Souza. Following a period of high public attention to
problems of hunger, poverty and nutrition in Brazil, Ananias held
coordinating meetings between community leaders and professionals
in health, education, nutrition and social assistance to
create a new government office to comprehensively administer
all of the city’s food security-related programs. This new office,
the Secretariat of Food Security “Supply” (Secretaria Municipal
Adjunta de Abastecimento [SMAAB]), developed new programs
and redesigned and improved old ones. In cooperation with the
Secretariat of Social Assistance and with aid from the Federal
government, it reinvigorated a decades-old Brazilian institution,
the Popular Restaurant. Today, with 2 main facilities and several
smaller “lunchrooms,” the Popular Restaurant program serves
over 12,000 meals each day, primarily lunches—traditionally the
largest meal for Brazilians. The menus are prepared from fresh
ingredients and planned by both local chefs and nutritionists.
Each 1,000 calorie-plus lunch consists of rice, beans, a meat or
vegetarian option, and salad or fruit, and costs the consumer one
Brazilian Real (R$1 = US$0.47). (The small breakfasts and dinners
at the Restaurants are R$0.25 and R$0.50, respectively.) To
maintain the low cost of the meals, which is meant to promote “food with dignity,” the federal and municipal governments subsidize
the program to cover staff, training, and equipment costs
that exceed the Restaurants’ incomes. The popular high-quality,
low-cost meals draw a mixed clientele: approximately 86.4% of
those who eat at the restaurants are low and very-low income
citizens (earning up to ~US$10,000/yr, with 34.9% of all patrons
earning below US$4,000/yr), but the rest of the patrons are a mix
of students and professionals from the middle- and upper-middle
classes, meaning that there is little or none of the social stigma
sometimes associated with assistance programs.
Like the Popular Restaurant program, the School Meals program
serves meals made from fresh ingredients to all the 157,000
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children in the municipal school system. Also subsidized by the
federal government, the School Meals provide at least 15% of the
daily nutritional requirements of the children in schools (Brazilian
schoolchildren only attend school for half the day). Younger children
who attend private daycares that partner with the city receive
100% of their daily nutritional requirements, and programs are
underway to supplement the meals of older public schoolchildren
for whom the School Lunch may be their only or primary meal.
This program and the Popular Restaurants require a significant
amount of food each day, especially vegetables—of which nearly
100% is provided by local farmers. Local, small and family-owned
farms in Greater Belo Horizonte are primarily vegetable producers,
and in cooperation with 5 municipalities in the area, SMAAB
buys as much produce as possible from associations of such
farms. This avoids sales through third-party intermediaries; the
city receives a lower price while the small-scale farmers receive
a higher income. This tactic has the added benefit of promoting
rural social sustainability—especially important in a country that
saw poverty and social policy push it from approximately 60% rural
to 80% urban in the past 50 years. In interviews with several of
the approximately 40 partner farmers, they consistently note that
since joining the SMAAB program, they have seen an increase in
the amount as well as the reliability of income.
In addition to selling directly to the city, the SMAAB partner
farms (less than 10 ha in size) have the opportunity to participate
in the “Direct from the Countryside” program. In this program,
farmers are granted sales spaces throughout the city of Belo
Horizonte, usually close to major thoroughfares and other highly
frequented areas. Many farmers supply the Restaurants, School
Meals, and other SMAAB programs, but others participate only
in Direct from the Countryside or the Organic Fairs throughout
the city, which have the same dual purposes of supporting local
production and encouraging direct interaction between the
consumers and the farmers. Such interactions have proven very
valuable in other programs more familiar in the global North, such
as CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture groups).
Various gains have already been realized under the Secretariat,
including the astonishing decrease in infant mortality between
1993 and 2006 from 34.4 deaths per 1,000 live births to approximately
3 deaths per 1,000 live births—an achievement that surpasses the UN Millennium Development goal. This dramatic
reduction has been due in no small part to cooperation with the
Municipal Secretariats of Health and Social Assistance, working
with their professionals and clinicians to identify at-risk children
and families, and to supplement the diets of expecting and nursing
mothers at little or no cost to the families. The distribution of
enriched flour—wheat plus manioc, pulverized egg shells, and
seeds—has been key to improving the diets of expectant and
recent mothers and their young children.
Another thrust of SMAAB, and key in terms of institutional
growth and sustainability, is the high importance it places on
education for adult consumers and children, through school programs,
community shows, average and lowest food price lists for |