Zero Hunger: forging a national food security policy in Brazil
By Stephen Bentley

"If every Brazilian can have three meals a day when my mandate expires, I will have carried out the mandate of my life."
--Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva

Pledging to feed the hungry masses may be the oldest empty election promise in the book, but in the case of Brazilian president-elect "Lula" da Silva, this promise just might have some substance. But the challenges are huge; Lula's Workers' Party (PT) has estimated that some 44 million people, a quarter of the country's population, are living below the poverty line.

Despite the magnitude of the task at hand, the PT's stints in power at the municipal level have shown that accountability to peoples' needs is a priority. The "participatory budget" introduced in the PT-led city of Porto Alegre has become a rare beacon of hope for activists around the world looking for creative ideas about how a local, human-centred economy could work.

With the help of a PT municipal government, Brazil's fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, has made leaps and bounds in achieving food security over the last decade. The PT has introduced a multi-pronged approach, introducing programs that assist poor families by supplementing their food consumption needs, regulating food prices, and bringing food to parts of the city once neglected by commercial outlets. Other initiatives provide technical and financial support to small farmers and build direct links between the city's consumers and rural producers.

Lula's Project Zero Hunger, to be inaugurated with his new government in January 2003, will bear much in common with Belo Horizonte's diverse set of programs, The Brazilian Forum for Food Security, an umbrella group of NGOs and social movements has praised this diversity: as economist Francisco Menezes put it, "In such a large complex country, a single blanket policy would not work."

Attacking the problem from many directions

Initially, efforts are likely to be pragmatic and emergency-oriented (emergency food baskets, for example, will be provided to families hit by flood and draught-most pervasive in Brazil's Northeast), but the overarching goal of Zero Hunger is to promote long-term national food security. The program aims to encourage spending on food to create an internal market that will support a revitalized agricultural sector of small and medium-sized family farms. The process will be supported by agrarian reform-- badly needed in a country where one percent of the country's population owns over fifty percent of arable land and where 42% of arable land lies idle.

To be administered by a Secretariat of Social Emergency, Zero Hunger's 21 areas of action will include a Food Coupon Program (PCA), inspired by the Food Stamp program in the U.S. Food vouchers, which can only be used in government-licensed food outlets, are to be distributed to every poor family to supplement the difference between family income and the poverty line. Zero Hunger will also include the establishment of food banks to redistribute surplus food from supermarkets, and popular restaurants, which will offer meals at cost.

Specific initiatives have been proposed to assist different sectors of the population. One will target low-income workers, while nutrition programs will supply food to pregnant women, new mothers and babies. The School Meals Program aims to increase the quality of school meals, making use of regional foodstuffs. Existing school meals programs will be expanded to cover siblings of children attending school and potentially be extended over school vacation periods, since the school meals that beneficiaries receive often constitute the only healthy meal eat in a day. More broadly focussed initiatives would include food and nutrition campaigns to educate the populace about healthy eating in order to prevent obesity and malnutrition.

What the critics are saying

One criticism levelled at Zero Hunger-even from within the PT-- is that the distribution of food vouchers will undermine the freedom of choice associated with a cash subsidy currently provided to poor families as part of a minimum income program. The argument is that it is the individual, not the government who knows best what his or her needs are: perhaps people find it more useful and dignified to receive a cash subsidy that can be spent on raising livestock or purchasing seeds to grow their own food than to receive coupons that can only be used toward food purchases.

Zero Hunger coordinator, Graziano da Silva, responds that food vouchers will augment, not replace current subsidy programs. Vouchers are seen also to have the dual benefit promot ing food production, as the aim of the program is not simply to fight hunger in the short term, but also to build food security in the longer term

Another worry is that food voucher distribution could lead to new black markets and increased corruption. Da Silva maintains that this problem can be avoided by using electronic means to distribute food coupons in the form of magnetic cards.

The limitations are real

Not least of the obstacles that stand in the path of implementing Zero Hunger is the state of the country's economy. National unemployment stands at 7.5%, and is as high as 9.3% in Sao Paulo State. In October, moreover, Brazil's inflation rate reached its highest point since 1994, when Plano Real, which pegged the Brazilian currency to the U.S. dollar, was enacted. Prices have risen 14.8 percent this year alone, including prices of food and basic commodities like gas, cooking fuel and electricity. This rapid rise in commodity prices has hit the country's poor especially hard, making efforts to ensure that the population is fed all the more difficult.

To make matters worse, Brazil has experienced a six-month long currency crisis, which has caused the value of the real to fall forty percent. This crisis has directly resulted from foreign investors' fears that the Workers' Party might actually win the election and enact policies inimical to investor interests. In order to allay Wall Street's paranoia about proletarian revolution and to receive the balance of a $30 billion bailout loan provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this summer, Lula has committed his government to maintaining fiscal austerity and vowed to honour all financial obligations entered into by the current government. This includes payment of a foreign debt of over $200 billion US, worth 55 percent of Brazil's GDP. Servicing the debt will severely curtail the resources that the PT government has to spend on social programs like the Zero Hunger Project. As one commentator put it, "[t]he problem of the international debt will keep the next administration on the edge of bankruptcy for the totality of its term."

Granted the ambitiousness of Zero Hunger and the limited resources Lula's government will have to work with, the suggestion made by Ryerson economist and food security analyst, Cecila Rocha, that "something has to give," makes a lot of sense. That "something" she says, is the country's extreme concentration of wealth. But Lula himself has warned that the county's inequalities cannot be wiped-out overnight, that "There is no magic." Progress towards redistributing Brazil's vast wealth may be especially slow given that, in order to get elected, Lula brought the PT into a close relationship with big business-never before seen in the party's history.

The current political configuration may also thwart Lula's best intentions. Lula may have won a landslide victory in the federal election, but the Workers' Party won the post of governor in only three of Brazil's 27 states. The PT holds fewer than twenty percent of seats in both houses of Brazilian Congress, while the passing of most laws in the country requires the

consent of at least 257 of 513 deputies and changing the constitution requires a 3/5 majority. Alliances with other left-leaning parties alone will not provide the required numbers, and centre and centre-right parties are unlikely to join with the PT to vote for radical social reform. Congress has already passed legislation limiting the future government's power to issue decrees

Social movements get a new lease on life

Despite the limitations placed on Brazil's future government, there is still room for optimism. Social change comes from society at large, and not simply from the government in power. Brazil's social movements, already a strong force, are likely to thrive under the newly favourable conditions provided by the PT government. As Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) leader and economist Joao Pedro Stedile has said, "Lula is the only candidate that brings together social forces that can make changes in the country…And a victory for Lula will bring a great excitement for all Brazilians, and will generate a process of activity in the mass movements." The MST has already gotten started: on November 9th, 180 families occupied two ranches in Sao Paulo State, putting an end to a self-imposed moratorium on land takeovers during the presidential elections.