Beginning to end hunger: food and the environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and beyond 9780520966338, 9780520293083, 9780520293090, 0520293088, 0520293096

Table of contents :
Introduction : food and famine futures, past and present --
Food security, food sovereignty, and beginning to end hunger --
Belo Horizonte : all five A's on the horizon --
Multiple streams and the evolution of the Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security --
Farm, farmer, and forest : SMASAN and the environment --
Conclusions : Belo Horizonte and beyond.

Citation preview

Beginning to End Hunger Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond

M. Jahi Chappell with a foreword by Frances Moore Lappé

university of california press

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Imprint in Humanities.

Beginning to End Hunger

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Beginning to End Hunger Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond

M. Jahi Chappell with a foreword by Frances Moore Lappé

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chappell, M. Jahi, author. Title: Beginning to end hunger : food and the environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and beyond / M. Jahi Chappell ; with a foreword by Frances Moore Lappé. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017036477 (print) | LCCN 2017046063 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520966338 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520293083 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520293090 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Food security—Brazil—Belo Horizonte. | Nutrition policy—Brazil—Belo Horizonte. | Food supply—Government policy—Brazil—Belo Horizonte. | Hunger. Classification: LCC HD9014.B8 (ebook) | LCC HD9014. B8 C47 2018 (print) | DDC 363.80981/51—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036477 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 10

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Dedicated to the memories of Benjamin Franklin Brown Sr., Clara Lucille Brown, Dorothy Chappell, William James Chappell, and Laticia Raggs, who helped make me the person I am; and Charity Hicks, Cynthia Hayes, Kathy Ozer, Moisés Machado, Rodney Bender, and Dick Levins, who helped show me the kind of person I want to be.

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Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword by Frances Moore Lappé Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Food and Famine Futures, Past and Present 2. Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Beginning to End Hunger 3. Belo Horizonte: All Five A’s on the Horizon 4. Multiple Streams and the Evolution of the Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security 5. Farm, Farmer, and Forest: SMASAN and the Environment 6. Conclusions: Belo Horizonte and Beyond Abbreviations Notes References Index

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1 34 66 101 132 175

201 203 215 235

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Illustrations

figures 1. Skyline of the “Beautiful Horizon”: Belo Horizonte, Brazil / 5 2. Food security proxy indicators 1990–2008 / 8 3. Health and nutrition statistics in Belo Horizonte and Brazil / 67 4. SMASAN organizational chart, ca. 2000 / 80 5. SMASAN organization chart, ca. 2017 / 81 6. Belo Horizonte and the Cerrado/Atlantic Forest transition zone / 142 7. Major urban areas and land cover south of Belo Horizonte / 143 8. Relationships in repeated social dilemmas / 199

tables 1. Resource use compared / 40 2. List of SMASAN Support for Basic Food Production programs / 82 3. List of SMASAN Management and Regulation of the Market programs / 83 4. List of SMASAN Promotion of Food Consumption and Nutrition programs / 84 ix

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Foreword

With the book you have before you, Jahi Chappell has achieved a remarkable feat. In Beginning to End Hunger he enables readers to examine very old questions with brand-new eyes. This book moves me in part for a deeply personal reason. Almost fifty years ago, what set me off on my path was the shock of discovering that much of the conventional way of perceiving the roots of hunger blocked us from solutions. Squirreled away in the University of California agricultural library, I wanted to know whether scarcity of food was really the culprit. Soon I realized we couldn’t blame stingy nature, for human beings were actively creating the experience of scarcity amid plenty. From there, my question “Why hunger?” grew, ultimately to this much bigger one: Why are we creating together a world that none of us as individuals would ever choose? Certainly no one I’ve ever encountered gets up in the morning determined to make anyone go hungry. Chappell helps us grasp the answer. He conveys the power of the human mind to frame and reframe causes of hunger and therefore possibilities for actually beginning to end it. I also love this book because I share Chappell’s belief that we humans learn by observing each other. It is by example and through stories that we best absorb new, and missed, opportunities. A gift he gives us is his intimate knowledge of the story of Brazil’s sixth largest city, Belo Horizonte (which means “Beautiful Horizon”), which has earned worldwide xi

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recognition for its quarter-century, many-faceted journey toward “food with dignity” for all. What comes through this remarkable story is that answers require our “reconsidering the very way we do governance, production, and consumption,” as the author writes. We learn that this rocky but oh-sorewarding road requires remaking the rules together. Then we can celebrate, for example, what must be an unprecedented achievement in the speed of social progress—under-five child mortality cut by 73% in just a decade—while at the same time staying fully cognizant of the vast undone work still under way. The story of Belo is offered not as a model to lock us into a new frame, but as lesson-filled experiences to crack open our sense of the possible. In this, Chappell convinces me that one of the greatest obstacles to solutions is our reluctance to take the first step when we can’t envision the entire road ahead. He persuades me that we really are capable of letting go of that unfortunate tendency. Finally, this remarkable book reminds me that hope itself has power. Neuroscientists tell us that hope actually helps to reorganize our neural pathways, our consciousness, toward solutions. And the story of a major city in one of the world’s most unequal societies achieving, however partial, what many believed to be impossible is precisely a story of what can happen in communities energized by hope. That is why I argue that honest hope is not for the faint at heart! For we all need courage to pick up this book’s lessons. In that vein, let me close with one of my favorite lines in this wonderful book: “Beware . . . any approach to thinking about the problems of the world that requires nothing of you, and puts blame or responsibility on others, as a matter of first principle.” Beginning to End Hunger is the opposite: It requires a lot from us—a willingness to try on new glasses and to embrace the joy of gaining clarity on one’s next step, letting go of any certainties beyond. Most works about world hunger carry directives such as “You should be more charitable” or “Shame on them—the evil ones keeping others hungry.” This book welcomes us to become part of the solution if we are willing to rethink common assumptions and to take the first step. Writing with humanity, humility, and irony, Dr. Chappell welcomes us onto this emancipatory road. Frances Moore Lappé March 2017

Preface

“You know, we were really happy when they threatened to sue us,” said Rubens, an administrator in the Belo Horizonte city government.1 Welcoming litigation is not something you would expect from a municipal official. Or from anyone else, for that matter. It was 2003, and I was on my first visit to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, with a group of Canadian nutrition students, coordinated by Cecilia Rocha, a Brazilian-Canadian nutrition economist. Cecilia is the foremost scholar of the extraordinary case of Belo Horizonte, a city whose food security policies are a “rare example of success” (Rocha 2001). While it might not—yet—literally be the “city that ended hunger” (Lappé 2010), it has made such significant strides in food security that such a tagline cannot be dismissed as hype alone. In fact, Belo Horizonte’s innovations in food security helped pilot some of Brazil’s national Zero Hunger food security policies, which have contributed to unprecedented decreases in inequality and poverty in Brazil since 2004. And Belo Horizonte itself has seen dramatic drops in malnutrition, and increases in fruit and vegetable consumption, since its food security programs started in 1993. The “they” Rubens celebrated for their possible lawsuit against the city—his employer—was an alliance of a local nonprofit and several community daycares. We were at the time being driven to one of the daycares in Belo Horizonte that received fresh food and meals through the city’s food security programs. These programs were managed under xiii

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a unified Municipal Secretariat (or Department) of Food and Nutritional Security, which had partnered with some of the community-run daycares in the city almost from the secretariat’s start. But a number of daycares in lower-income areas felt that they had every right to access the daycare meal programs as well. So they coordinated with local NGOs and movements for daycare access to pressure the city to extend its partnerships beyond the limited initial number of daycares. For Rubens, the push indicated that the city’s message and the goal of the secretariat—to guarantee the right to food for all of its citizens—had been truly internalized by Belo Horizonte’s citizens. That some citizens had organized to force the city to fulfill its commitments was a good sign, and helped solidify the secretariat’s plans to extend its programs. Our tour of the daycare complete, our guide offered to give several of us a ride back. Rubens casually mentioned in the car that our driver and guide had been one of the NGO leaders at the forefront of the lawsuit effort. “Of course we sued them,” she said. “There is still a lot of work to do, and the daycares that are not part of the program [need the help], but we have made good progress working [with the secretariat]. Sometimes, you have to force the government to do the right thing.” Rubens smiled. Since that first trip in 2003, Belo Horizonte has been a major part of my life. Its extraordinary advances, and the barriers and limits to its successes, offer a unique lens through which to glimpse the potential to decisively end all hunger, everywhere. The fieldwork for this book was conducted primarily during four extended field seasons between 2003 and 2007, supplemented by three week-long study trips between 2010 and 2013. Interviews during my field research were supplemented with participant observation on local farms and in the offices of the Belo Horizonte government, as well as municipal documentation and the academic literature.2 At the daycare, while kids laughed and played, I read a Paulo Freire quote posted on the wall in marker: “No one walks without learning how to walk; without learning how to make the path by walking it, retracing and re-dreaming the dream that bade them to walk in the first place” (Freire 1997, 155).3 The sum of my efforts—the results of which you hold in your hands—is aimed at helping us make the path by walking it. And my efforts, of course, are in turn fundamentally built on the hard work and struggle of all of the citizens, organizations, movements, program staff, and policy makers behind Belo Horizonte’s programs.

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The course to universal food security will never run smooth, but steps forward have and can be made. Belo Horizonte has walked a bit farther down the path than most. It remains to all of us to retrace, redream, and continue to forge the path by walking it, until hunger has well and truly been ended, in Belo Horizonte and beyond.

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Acknowledgments

One might say that it takes a village to write a book. I cannot possibly name here all of the residents of the village who helped this book get completed, and so I ask the forbearance of any of my friends and family who are not called out individually, when all of them deserve to be. This book is the result of countless interactions, supportive conversations, constructive criticism, and the comradery and support of so many people. I hope any who were counting on seeing their names in the bright lights of an academic book acknowledgment section but were inadvertently omitted will nevertheless accept my sincere thanks, and as many hugs and/or beers as they would like. I hope that the work you find now in your hands does justice to all the members of my “village.” If this book is exceptional in any measure, it is because of their support; if it is not, well. . . . I always thought it would be amusing for an acknowledgment section to finally and defiantly pass the buck. But honesty, not just convention, compels me to admit that any and all flaws are my responsibility, and likely reflect not heeding a bit of good advice from someone. Among the Village-Who-Raised-This-Book, I specifically thank my parents, Betty and Michael, who have consistently gone above and beyond the call of duty, and my sister Aisha for her love, confidence, and support. Dr. Brown-Chappell, aka Dr. Mom, however, deserves an extra helping of thanks for taking on the role of unpaid assistant on several occasions. xvii

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My intellectual mentors have often gone above and beyond in their support as well, but none more so than John Vandermeer, my PhD committee chair and major professor. John has said he views his graduate students as being like his children; accordingly, he has been like a second father. His passion as a naturalist, ecologist, and critical activist, alongside his profound moral compass, have given me much to aspire to. Perhaps I’ll even get back to the math stuff someday. Maria Carmen Lemos, Rodrigo Matta Machado, Ivette Perfecto, Cecilia Rocha, Jerry Smith, and Catherine Badgley have also been peerless mentors, critics, friends, and traveling companions. I could fill a book (as it were) with what I learned from each of them. I would like to acknowledge my singular debt to Cecilia, whose pioneering work on Belo Horizonte has been fundamental for my own. And Rodrigo’s mentorship, hospitality, and friendship were also endlessly helpful, up to and including his excellent recommendations for where to find good food and jazz in Beagá. Thanks as well to other mentors and scholars who have made a deep impact on me, including Miguel Altieri, Rachel Bezner-Kerr, Joern Fischer, Eric Holt-Giménez, Steve Gliessman, Doug Gurian-Sherman, Frances Moore Lappé, Phil McMichael, Raj Patel, Peter Rosset, and Wendy Wolford. Another important section of this book’s “village” is my “PerfectaMeerkat” Family. Indebted as I am to all of them for their friendship and comradery, I am particularly indebted to Katia Avilés Vázquez, Julie Cotton, Katie Goodall, Doug Jackson, Julie Jedlicka, Shalene Jha, Brenda Lin, Krista McGuire, Stacy Philpott, Lindsay Smith, Casey Taylor, Maria Whittaker, and Senay Yitbarek. I am thankful as well for the support and trust of the “next generation” of PerfectaMeerkats, including my own advisees Michael Lege, James Moore, Janel Skreen, Jude Wait, Becca Neville, and Amber Heckelman. Thanks to the folks who helped make sure things ran smoothly during my PhD research, especially the staff of the UM Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Graduate office during my time there: Christy ByksJazayeri, Julia Eussen, Barb Klumpp, Gail Kuhnlein, Jane Sullivan, and LaDonna Walker; and to NWAEG Ann Arbor and the late Beverly Rathcke. I thank Sunny Power and the Power Lab at Cornell University for their feedback and friendship, as well as all of NWAEG Cornell, and Cornell University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies, particularly Sara Pritchard, Stephen Hilgartner, and Darla Thompson.

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In Brazil, um mil de thanks goes to the staff, past and present, of the Municipal Secretariat of Food Security, most especially to Zoraya Souza and Adilana Oliveira de Rocha, who gave essential support at practically every stage of this process, and are dear friends as well. I am thankful as well for the support and friendship of Paula, Dani, Jamil, Emil, Professor Gilberto, Adriana Aranha, and the late Moisés Machado. And my deepest thanks are due to all the Belo Horizonte–area farmers who agreed to be interviewed or let me work on their property. Also in Brazil, thanks to Jacques Delabie and his group at the Laboratório de Mirmecologia at the Executive Commission for Cacao Production Planning for their welcome and help with ant identification. I am also grateful for the assistance of Felipe “Casper” Borges Peixoto, Daniel Sobota, Jason Goldstick (then at the University of Michigan Center for Statistical Consultation and Research), Ivanete Simões, and Evandro Silva, as well as Evandro’s family, Gilmara, Sabrina, and Juni, who twice graciously took me into their home. With regards to the many people who have made this journey possible on a personal level and brought joy, laughter, and support into my life, I hazard to offer my particular thanks to Jeff Winokur; Ellecia, Elliot, Eva, and Cameron Williams; Justin Vidovic; Molly Thornbladh; Becky Taurog; Pam Stewart; Chris Smith; Amy Smith; Annie Shattuck and Mike Dwyer; Jemila Sequeira; Liz Saunders; Hilary Sarat-St.Peter; Karen Quiroz; Pat Purdy and Aislinn Williams; Dan, Sarah, and Robin Pezzat; Gail Patterson-Gladney; Chris, Steph, Ace, Jules, George, and Janet Olson; Chris, Shannon, and Connor Nitchie; Pavithra Narayanan; Laurie Mercier; Todd Meder; Ann Lurie; Tonda Liggett; Andrew Kraemer; Maya Jordan; Mandy Izzo and Bobby Reiner; Kate Hoff and Bob Weidman; Desiree Hellegers; Michelle Grace and Abhi Ghosh; Marcelo Diversi; Alison DeSimone; Cynthia Cooper; Katie Bucrek; “Big” Ben Brown; Louie Brennan; Jonathan Bearup and Millie Combs; Joe Bauer; and Dawn Banker. I thank as well Sharon Mudd, Kris Konz, Carly Gershone, and Dena Drasin, mental health professionals whose help made a tremendous impact as I dealt, and continue to deal, with the challenges of depression. Thank you to the many reviewers, formal and informal, of various versions of this work, which includes many of those named above, as well as Annie Shattuck, Maywa Montenegro, Casey Taylor, Valentine Cadieux, Alastair Iles, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Hannah Wittman, Raj Patel, Priscilla Claeys, Dean Bavington, Rita Simone Barbosa Liberato, Ryan Isakson, David Meek, Nick Jackson, and Rob Wallace. Thanks as

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well to Maya Jordan for logistical support. Bradley Depew, Merrik Bush-Pirkle, Kate Marshall, and particularly Blake Edgar, editors (current and former) at UC Press, have been wonderfully supportive throughout the challenge of publishing my first book. The research presented in this book benefited from support by the U.S. National Security Education Program’s David L. Boren Fellowship, the U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, and Washington State University’s Faculty Mini-Grant Program; along with the University of Michigan’s Rackham Merit Fellowship, Sokol International Research Fellowship, and Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Block Grants.

chapter 1

Introduction Food and Famine Futures, Past and Present

The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed. —William Gibson (1999)

For me, speculative fiction author William Gibson’s quote evokes the dreams of a future of high technology: robots, “smart” homes, powerful personal gadgets, dinosaur-sized autonomous mechanical harvesters, and flying, self-driving cars. While the debates over the significance and implications of such technologies can veer into the abstract for those of us in the Minority World—a term coined by Bangladeshi artist Shahidul Alam (2008) to refer to the minority of the world’s population living in the richest countries—they might seem positively irrelevant to the billions of the world’s refugees, poor, violently oppressed, and disenfranchised.1 The disconnect between technologies like these and the actual challenges facing the poor and the hungry might even strike some as a cruel joke. However, the truth is that the future will be based not on the promises of whiz-bang technology, but on the more mundane features of the decisions our societies make about what we will do, how we will do it, and who will get to decide. That is, our future fates are based on our institutions. “Institutions,” as a technical term, refers to the rules prevalent in a society. They are essentially about how we run our lives individually and collectively, and the many conscious, and unconscious, mechanics underneath the surface. Our ancestors would likely be just as shocked at these institutional foundations of our current societies as they would be at the tools and technology that support them. Institutions, in this way, are as much the stuff of sci-fi fantasy as bleeding-edge 1

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plant breeding techniques and the Dick Tracy wrist-radio/watches some of us now wear on our wrists. Despite the core functions that institutions embody, they are definitely not what first comes to mind for most people when they think of the Matrix trilogy. The Wachowskis’ turn-of-the-twentieth-century cinematic series is remembered more as a lead-in to a new age of computeraugmented special-effects action and elaborately choreographed martial arts set pieces. For some (me excluded) it is remembered as disappointing and artistically unsuccessful. Rarely appreciated is that the series undermined some of the typical tropes of Hollywood and contemporary capitalist society more broadly. The Matrix movies are some of the few films that are fundamentally about institutions, and not just about the “good” and “bad” people in them. This is an important distinction, as changes in institutions are fundamental to the core story of this book: how the food security policies of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, show us how we may begin to end hunger. The plot of The Matrix and its sequels revolves around a dystopian future where humans have been completely subjugated by sentient machines. The human race, save for a small resistance, are trapped in a virtual reality simulating late twentieth-century Earth. In order to keep humans docile and amenable to the deception, there are multiple “systems of control.” These extend beyond the virtual Matrix and into schemes-within-schemes by the oppressive Machines. Importantly, the Machines have contingencies deployed such that those humans who “wake up” from the Matrix, or try to do so, end up playing into a larger cycle designed to control human rebels in the real world, channeling otherwise unpredictable human tendencies into a repeated pattern of rebellion, defeat, and reinsertion into new versions of the system of control the Matrix represents. All that said, over the course of the movies, we learn that the Machines are not necessarily villains. They, too, are trying—and have a right—to survive. So while Western popular culture has long focused on individual choice and the characteristics of singular “bad guys” and “good guys,” the Wachowskis’ trilogy puts these choices in the context of people’s (and machines’) interactions with institutions—that is to say, of their interactions with the underlying mechanics of social behavior. As used by social scientists, the term “institutions” is used to group together the norms, rules, and values behind our actions and reactions. There are numerous examples of institutions at work in our everyday lives, from our conceptions of a nuclear family to how to behave in public, how we

Introduction | 3

drive (or don’t), and the natures of our schools and workplaces. These structures map out a lot of our actions so that we don’t have to think consciously about our behavior every moment and in every social situation. For a broad range of institutions, we have internalized their dictates to the extent that we rarely question or even notice them. This is not to say that the written and unwritten rules of institutions don’t change. They can gradually evolve, or be changed rapidly as individuals and groups resist, ignore, or enforce any particular set of institutions. To illustrate, let’s briefly consider the institution of marriage. The meaning of marriage has changed fairly significantly over the past decades and centuries, particularly in the Minority World. The expectations and practices built around the putative superiority husbands hold over their wives have thankfully declined in many places, increasingly (if fitfully) replaced by a sense of the romantic joining of equals. The increasing acceptance of same-sex marriages aligns well with this latter sense, but clashes with some of the rules, norms, and values understood as traditional (and either unchanged or unchangeable) by others. At the same time, many common elements extend across differing understandings of marriage. Some broad, but not universal, norms for marriage include assumptions of sexual fidelity, cohabitation, and coparenting children. Any one of these need not hold for a particular marriage, but just as for any other rulebook or tradition, such differences are widely recognized as varying from mainstream expectations (regardless of whether those expectations are thought to be positive, negative, or neutral). This book, however, is precisely about positive deviations from the norm: changing the rulebooks around food from where they are now to where we need them to be if we are to end hunger. Referring to just such a gap, one of the peer reviewers for an article by geographer Jesse Ribot suggested that “the institutions, processes and forums that could enable the fundamental changes you call for do not yet exist.” Ribot responded: They do exist in some places at some times for some people. . . . If we, as analysts or activists, insist on requiring that all interventions enable democracy, and we insist this demand be enforced, we may help force the hand of practice. . . . I do not want to act or be in a world that does not try. Democracy is an ongoing struggle. It is not a state to be arrived at. It will come and go in degrees. Trying is the struggle that produces emancipatory moments— however ephemeral they may be. The fleeting joy and creativity of freedom seem worth it. (2014, 698)

Important institutions, such as nation-states, human rights, public education, and gender equality, have never been instantly and evenly

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distributed worldwide. They all started as an idea among a smaller number of people that went on to influence and shape billions. It is the same with hunger, where the future institutions we need are in many ways already here, if in imperfect forms.

active optimism Não sou otimista babaca, mas otimista ativo. —Herbert de Souza, quoted in Helvecia (1994)

This quote from the late Brazilian sociologist Herbert “Betinho” de Souza came to my attention in one of the first analyses of the food policies of the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (BH)—the subject of this book and the site of a set of important and “futuristic” institutions (figure 1). In this analysis by Adriana Aranha, a former BH administrator, she quotes Betinho’s statement that “I’m not some stupid optimist.” Rather, he assured us, “I’m an active optimist.” Aranha used the quote to begin her master’s thesis analyzing Belo Horizonte’s programs, which she had helped shape and implement over the previous years. I happen to like it, too. Betinho gets at the most fundamental element of ending hunger: an activist optimism that demands we take on the notion that hunger can be ended. In the vein of Betinho, this book sets out to show that active optimists can bring about a future without hunger, by respecting, improving, and more evenly spreading the institutions to make it possible. In the United States, it sometimes feels like active optimism—insisting on not only the possibility of change but also its urgent necessity—is taken to be synonymous with being a self-righteous ass.2 Our politics and philosophies are often shrunk down to the idea that our only power lies in our consumption choices—buying our way to a more just and sustainable world—without acknowledging that, among other things, this literally defines away the power of the poorest to change the system. In elevating the consumer to fill or replace the role of citizen, it relegates citizenship—not just voting, but organizing, protesting, resisting, and agitating—to the margins. Achieving change becomes the responsibility of the comfortable, who as a matter of course question neither the basis of their comfort nor whether changing their consumption patterns represents change enough. Indeed, “and next we’ll solve world hunger” has long been used to take know-it-alls down a peg: “We’ll do what you say, right after we do this thing that is effectively impossible.” Such fatalism, matched with

Introduction | 5

figure 1. View of the lookout in the Mangabeiras neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, ©bcorreabh / Adobe Stock 2017.

images past and present of starvation around the world, has fixed the idea that hunger and starvation are inevitable and insoluble. I won’t try to convince you that this idea is bandied about to justify continued hunger in and of itself. But neither will I rationalize the deprivation and repression that exist alongside food surpluses. Rather, without being cynical, a rational analysis of current food policy and the history of its development and distribution must consider how such notions have often been applied. We must recognize that the stories we tell ourselves often circulate not because they are true, but because they are useful in maintaining political systems that many of us would otherwise question. Indeed, any rational analysis of policies and possibilities, whether of food systems or more broadly, must consider questions of epistemology, or the nature of knowing. How do I know what I think I know? If what I think I know is wrong, what does that mean for what the “correct” policies and processes might be? And if there are errors or incompleteness around what I thought I knew, why? Cui bono? Who benefits from this? Obviously, this is not the place for a complete survey of the field of epistemology. But a broad appreciation of the importance and implications of its concepts is vital. Food policies, as we will see, have too often been based on things that we think we know but that don’t hold up

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under scrutiny. So when we engage in a careful examination of the big picture, we often cut against the stories broadcast across mainstream media and transmitted even by many a researcher who should know better. We are led to the necessity, then, of grappling with epistemology. Only then can we figure out how to reconcile what we believed we knew about food, what conflicting sources tell us, and what we may be called on to know tomorrow. So how do we know what we think we know? This is a harder question to answer than it appears. We “know,” for instance, that we will need 70–100% more food in the next several decades—a number cited by many top scholarly journals, news sites, and prominent officials (Cribb 2010; Jackson 2015; Ray et al. 2013). But political economist Tim Wise shows that the projections such estimates are based on were never meant to be taken as predictions of what ought to happen, or what has to happen; in the case of the upper-end projection of 100%, it is not even clear where it originally came from (2013, 3).3 With regards to the low-end projection of 70%, the authors of the report that originally derived it have themselves advised against citing it as a projection of what we will need for the future (Alexandratos and Bruinsma 2012, 7). Beyond that, they updated their estimate from a 70% increase to just 60%.4 They also figure, however, that we are on track to meet that increase (Wise 2013, 4–6). While it is quite likely such production would continue to incur serious costs to our environment, we also already have the means to mitigate or avoid these costs. We could be forgiven for thinking that this was a controversial or disproven idea, however, as many experts have breathlessly repeated the need for a whole new (technology-focused) paradigm. If these basic interpretations are incorrect or incomplete, what might that mean for our proposed solutions? What might that mean for our model of how the world works? And who benefits—Cui bono?—from a model that overestimates how much food we need while underplaying the potential of reducing food waste and changing diets, and dismisses as wistful thinking the possibility of political changes to make our food systems more fair and equitable? The historical roots of these misconceptions and misinterpretations, in fact, are deeply embedded in the histories of food, agriculture, and science alike.

how malthus earned his meals The ideas of the English political economist Thomas Malthus have been immensely influential since the publication of his Essay on the Principle

Introduction | 7

of Population in 1798. His writings about population and food not only profoundly affected social sciences such as economics and political science but also were pivotal in the development of evolutionary biology and ecology. Malthus proposed that human populations will grow exponentially with time, while food production will rise only linearly. Under these conditions, the amount of food available per individual will constantly decline, until some individuals, without food, starve and die. With the poor and starving an everyday sight in late Georgian England, and with massive riches accumulating to the few through burgeoning international trade and the Industrial Revolution, Malthus derived a brutally elegant application of his theory. The reason the poor are poor and stay poor, he proposed, is because the amount of food in society can only increase so fast, outpaced by the constancy of the “passion between the sexes” that lead the poor to produce more offspring than they can feed. After all, if several children of a poor family survive, and each produces several surviving children of their own, then even the poorest couple will end up with dozens of descendants who do not have the means to take care of themselves, much less pass on resources to their children. Giving the poor more resources directly, however, will do nothing to improve things in his view. With more resources, poor couples will simply have more children than they otherwise would have, who themselves will have yet more children, leading to exponential growth that always surpasses the (hypothesized) linear growth in food supply. Thus, the resources of the poor will always be stretched by more mouths to feed than can be supported. What is one to do? “Nothing” is one of Malthus’s answers that has stuck with us ever since. “Nothing” was an option long before Malthus, of course, but his calculations established it as a scientific “fact.” Now, thanks to him, we “know” that if you give the poor resources, they will simply end up right back in poverty where they started, by way of the passions of exponential growth. To help the poor then is, in fact, to hurt them, and so the ratchet of the “survival of the fittest” must be endured to whittle away “excess” people. The overbreeding poor lack the industriousness and self-control to pull themselves out of their miserable circumstances. Life as we know it, however, limits Malthus’s applicability. First, a simple observation. There is no necessary condition by which food rises linearly while populations increase exponentially. The reality of human systems, in fact, is that our food supplies have variously decreased,

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3,500

106

3,000

104

2,500

102

2,000

100

1,500

98

1,000

96

500

94

0 1990

1993

1996

1999

2002

2005

Index, base 1999–2001 = 100

Millions of people globally

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92 2008

Year Absolute poverty

Undernourishment

Disaster-affected

Food production per capita

figure 2. Different food security proxy indicators paint different pictures. Undernourishment is far greater than just those affected by disasters but much less than those living in absolute poverty. And none of those measures show the improvement over time that food availability measures do. Data sources: Absolute poverty (< $2/ person per day): Chen and Ravallion (2008); Undernourishment: FAO (2009a); Disaster-affected populations: International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (various years). Gross food production per capita (base 1999–2001 = 100): FAO (2009b). Food production series to be read against right-hand vertical axis; all other series against left-hand vertical axis. Unfortunately, no comparable series are available for micronutrient malnutrition or for perceptions-based measures. From C. B. Barrett. 2010. “Measuring Food Insecurity.” Science 327(5967): 825–28. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

increased linearly, and increased exponentially, depending on the time period and scale at which one looks.5 Importantly, per capita food availability, or how much food is theoretically available in the world for each person, has often kept pace with or even outpaced population growth (see figure 2). This means that at times food supply has grown faster than human population. So the facts refute Malthus’s modest proposal in multiple ways. It behooves us, then, to further explore the implications of Malthus’s model. We asked, Cui bono?—Who benefits? Setting aside the debate of whether the poor produce their own failures as a class—they don’t—

Introduction | 9

clearly Malthus’s argument weighs heavily in favor of those who already have most of the resources. If giving poor people food, perversely, only hurts poor people, then governments and the society at large bear an ethical obligation to avoid exacerbating the condition of the poor with well-meaning “help.” Of course, that is also a roundabout argument for benefiting the wealthy elite, who might otherwise be legally and morally obliged to give aid to the poor and marginalized, whether through higher taxes paid to the government to support those at the bottom, increased “charity,” or higher wages to their employees. This “side effect” of Malthus’s reasoning needs to be moved back to front and center. The idea that Malthus’s propositions were neither the inevitable result of “science” nor necessarily of any help to the poor does not just stem from many decades of hindsight. Malthus’s Essay was in fact an entry into an ongoing debate with French political scientist and mathematician Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet maintained that overpopulation “would be solved by reasoned human action: through increases in productivity, through better conservation and prevention of waste, and through education (especially female education) which would contribute to reducing the birth rate” (Sen 1994, para. 22). While famines brought on by a combination of weather events and British policies led to the deaths of millions of Indians in the last decades of the nineteenth century, British officials based arguments against distributing food to them on Malthusian logic. That British policies resulted in food being shipped away from places where people were already starving did little to compel rethinking these policies, nor did criticism from a number of prominent figures of the time, including the statistician and pioneer of modern nursing Florence Nightingale (Davis 2001). Yet despite the supposed superior scientific basis of British policies, at least one contemporary economic historian documented “thirtyone serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia” (Walford 1878, as cited by Davis 2001, 287). Why the difference? The answer is found in part in historical counterexamples. Political ecologist Mike Davis describes “moral economies” wherein societal traditions buffered the effects of extreme weather events through systems of mutual obligation, allowing better distribution of food during times of scarcity. He also notes the “famine defense in depth” that Chinese officials deployed in response to the withering drought of 1743–1744, averting “mass mortality from either starvation or disease” (Davis 2001, 280). The officials succeeded in averting famine

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not by growing more food or by the (ineffective and inhumane) Malthusian logic of starving the poor until their numbers decreased, but through a combination of local stockpiling and holding local officials accountable for food security. In short, it was long known how to combat famine: take the direction opposite to that of British imperial policy. But even beyond Davis’s well-researched examples, we needn’t depart far from Malthus’s original formulation to question it. There is at least one obvious flaw to his observations about the poor, or rather, with regards to his inattention to the non-poor. We need ask again, Cui bono? If we were to take it as a general rule that food increases linearly and population increases exponentially, should it not also be true that the wealthy, who have ample food and resources at their disposal, should respond by also having more children, such that they too would become poor? Would not their similarly uncontrollable passion lead to multiple descendants who constantly divide their antecedents’ wealth into everdwindling piles? This is, after all, the plain implication of Malthus’s theory, which has been applied to everything from plants, bacteria, and nonhuman animals to the poor. Yet we do not commonly see the assumption that the rich will overbreed until they are poor, with starving to death the only way to limit their numbers or spur them to self-control. What an odd quirk, then, that of all the living things on Earth, it should be rich humans—and only rich humans—who do not obey the conditions of Malthus’s theory. It turns out, of course, that Malthus was wrong in a number of his assumptions. As Sen (1994) points out, part of the debate between Malthus and Condorcet centered around how much “reasoned human action” might allow for the control of population growth. Malthus was convinced that nothing but poverty and the inability to obtain enough of the “necessaries” of life would stop people from raising the largest of families. Even that, he thought, might not be enough. In short, Malthus concluded, Condorcet’s faith in reasoned human action was entirely misplaced. No, in order to control population, and therefore hunger and misery, as people outgrew the linear ability of the land to feed them, you “could not [depend on] voluntary decisions of the people involved,” Sen summarizes. Nor could it happen through “acting from a position of strength and economic security.” Rather, “it must come from overriding their preferences through the compulsions of economic necessity” (Sen 1994). A telling precept behind Malthusian thinking is the idea that there are too many of “them” (Harvey 1974; Sen 1994). That is, when thinking

Introduction | 11

about the effects of people overpopulating their food source, the “people” who are the object of analysis tend to be those in some other country, community, or social class than those conducting the analysis. Geographer David Harvey argues that this is no coincidence. In fact, he points out, Malthus explicitly argued that his ideas did not apply to the wealthier class, who by all Malthusian logic should also breed themselves out of wealth, house, and home. Thus we see that Malthus essentially proposes that there are two types of humans: the rich and the poor, also known as “us” and “them.” “We” can wisely govern our resources and population through policies that are collaborative and rely on “reasoned human action.” “They,” however, will need their reproduction to be controlled more coercively, or even through directly repressive means.6 It is clear that such an attitude benefits the rich and, to a large extent, the middle class in each society, as well as the residents of the industrialized societies of the Minority World. Garrett Hardin’s classic (1968) thought experiment of the “tragedy of the commons” draws on a logical structure similar to Malthus’s views. Indeed, in a lesser-known article “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Hardin (1974) explicitly argues that we may not be able to “save” all of the world’s people given the limited resources of our biosphere (the “lifeboat” of the title). Given that we must choose whom to save and whom to let perish in the sea of poverty around us, he admonishes the reader not to give in to soft-hearted liberal ideals: they will merely lead to overloading the lifeboat and drowning us all. Similarly, we should not capitulate to characterizations of historical misfortunes and inequalities that might imply “we” do not deserve to be in the boat by ourselves in the first place, because such noble thoughts are nonetheless misguided and, again, lead to disaster for all involved. But a funny thing happened on the way to the lifeboat. Hardin explicitly organizes his thinking around “we.” “We” have to make these tough decisions. “We” need to get over our ethics and deny “our” resources to those who would simply keep reproducing, as “we cannot safely divide the wealth equitably among all peoples so long as people reproduce at different rates.” The problematic immigrants and peoples of the Majority World that he advocates excluding are assumed not to be “us,” even if “they” may comprise a significant part of his readership. We could hardly ask for a better demonstration of the relevance of cui bono, and a certain perverse Panglossianism, laid bare in what could be faithfully rephrased as, “It just so happens that my logic says ‘we’ get to live, and

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‘they’ get to starve and die.” How fortunate (or unfortunate depending on the vantage point) that such “logical” reasoning benefits “us” and dooms “them,” but those are the breaks in this, the best of all possible worlds. We might better apply what I call we bono to this sort of motivated reasoning. That is to say, we might suppose that the more a chain of reasoning places burdens or costs on others, or maintains or improves a beneficial status quo for the reasoner, the more likely the reasoning is incomplete or incorrect. Beware, then, any approach to thinking about the problems of the world that requires nothing of you and puts blame or responsibility on others, as a matter of first principle. While there are no doubt problems for which we bear no responsibility, it is all too easy and too tempting to assume this is also true of problems for which we clearly have the capability to improve things.

eight simple rules for understanding global food systems So what we believe—expediently or not—has profound effects on notions of reality and the interventions we subsequently propose. We bono reasoning, for one, is refuted by more than logical inference. The facts on the ground, based on evidence out of the heart of scientific practice, also refuse to cooperate. In fact, in a self-conscious parallel to Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins’s narrative of how they came to write the indispensable World Hunger: 10 Myths, my own exploration of these issues has led me to eight basic propositions about global food systems. These refute not only we bono, but many of the most basic assumptions about the nature of the crisis held by even the most conscientious of reformers. 1. There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone full, healthy diets The suggested average daily intake of calories is about 2,300 calories per person per day (USHHS and USDA 2015). Since 2010, humanity has steadily consumed an estimated average of nearly 2,900 calories of food per person per day (FAO 2009b/2016). This is the amount of calories available after food loss due to waste and conversion to livestock is taken into account. It has been estimated that 10–50% of total global food production is lost along the production and consumption chains (data and analysis to date have not been adequate to resolve the lack of

Introduction | 13

a consensus estimate; Parfitt, Barthel, and Macnaughton 2010). A further 1,200 calories per person per day are lost on the net from the conversion of crop plant matter to livestock: we feed animals about 1,700 calories per person per day and gain back about 500 calories from their products (Smil 2000, in Lundqvist, de Fraiture, and Molden 2008). There are various possible arguments to justify some degree of livestock cultivation and meat eating, including the thesis that, in some cases, integrated crop-livestock systems see the highest possible environmental efficiency. It is also true that a number of people around the world depend on animal protein in ways that, culturally or logistically, are not easily replaced. At the same time, we must remember that the inefficient practice of feeding livestock food that theoretically could have been grown for humans takes place mostly in the heavily industrialized Minority World, particularly in the United States and the European Union. Countries of the Minority World also purchase a disproportionate tonnage of livestock products produced in the Majority World, such as the beef raised in Brazil and the soy raised there to feed cattle throughout the world. And overconsumption of meat, particularly industrially produced meat, is ultimately harmful to the health of those eating it. Put simply, there are viable arguments for producing and eating some meat. But there are practically no scientifically and ethically defensible arguments for the amount of meat eaten by an increasing number of people in the world, given the environmental harms, ethical mistreatment of animals, likely morbidities in consumers, and the inefficiency of feeding our crops to domestic animals (whom we then eat). Whatever their merits in general terms, the pro-meat arguments practically all fail as justifications for an expanding model of industrial-scale meat production and consumption. It may be heroic to assume that we can produce major changes in dietary and waste trends. It would, at the same time, be irrational to focus on producing more food without dramatically upping our efforts to avoid wasting it. It is a simple matter of thermodynamics—the basic physics of the universe—that it is more efficient to use what you have already produced and waste less of it than it is to increase production and continue with the same degree of waste. This is true even if we recycle that waste. To put it in stark relief, imagine a situation where one in every two houses built in a town burned down before anyone ever lived in them. Imagine the town also meanwhile suffered a lack of affordable housing. Does it make more sense to invest our always-limited resources in building more houses and accepting half of them as so much expensive

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kindling? Or would it be better to invest the majority of our effort in reducing the proportion of houses that burn down, even if that is hard, but not impossible, to do? Long story short, per person food production in the world has been consistently increasing for decades, at a faster rate than the increases in the total population of people in the world. If large-scale insufficiency in food were a root cause of global hunger, then we should have expected to see much more progress in—if not the eradication of—hunger over the past sixty years. It is simply not viable to argue that “ending world hunger” has to do with increasing the total amount of food in the world. To paraphrase Roberts, the noted Dread Pirate, most of the time those who say differently are trying to sell you something (and in this case, literally so). 2. There is more than enough food in most countries for all citizens of those countries to have full and healthy diets There is a more sophisticated position on “solving” world hunger that starts from a recognition that food security is most affected by what food is available to individuals in their specific contexts, not how much food there is in the world. On its own, this contention is self-evident. That the average U.S. consumer has access to around 3,639 calories per day (FAO 2009b/2016) does nothing to provide income, human rights, or indeed food itself to a poor farmer in India, Haiti, Uganda, or any one of thousands of places facing serious food insecurity. Absolute calories even do little to alleviate the burden on the over 11 million Americans who live in households characterized as having very low food security or the additional 30 million who live in households that are characterized as having “merely” low food security (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2016, 6–9).7 And although trade does alter how much food is available in each country, only 12–17% of food crosses international borders between production and consumption.8 Data collected by economist Lisa Smith and colleagues (2000) indicated that around 78% of malnourished children in the 1990s lived in countries with “food energy surpluses.” In fact, even sub-Saharan Africa had enough food as a region to provide 100–110% of “dietary sufficiency” for its population between 1991 and 2015, despite the fact that it is often put forward as the foremost case where “we” need to produce more food. In terms of individual countries, data from forty sub-Saharan

Introduction | 15

countries and territories for the years 2014–2016 showed that thirtytwo of them had dietary energy sufficiencies of 100% or more (FAO 2009b/2016).9 Even more surprisingly, India—which has an estimated 2,400 calories per person per day available within its borders—has one of the highest rates of child malnutrition in the world and is home to 195 million people suffering from food insecurity. To put this in perspective, the entire continent of Africa has an estimated 232 million food insecure people, 220 million of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa (FAO 2015a, Annex 1; FAO 2009b/2016). If we compare regions, rather than country to continent, Southern Asia’s 281 million food insecure individuals certainly merit at least as much concern as the 220 million people living this way in sub-Saharan Africa. But one might suspect that Africa continues to bear the brunt of the world’s attention because it is an area where food availability hovers closer to the line in terms of being sufficient, in the aggregate, to feed its populace. The dominant narrative that focuses on production and the notion that solving hunger is about producing calories only works when there is not an abundance of calories available. In fact, you may see India touted as one of the success stories of the agricultural changes of the past six decades, the so-called Green Revolution that allowed India to “overcome [its] own monumental hunger problems” (Paarlberg 2010). The fact that one of the centers of the Green Revolution still suffers from profound hunger makes it far less attractive as a focus of discussion than Africa, where many countries and regions do indeed see low agricultural productivity, soil problems, and food insecurity occurring together. The point here is not to say that food production, food availability, and food security share no relationship. Clearly that is false. But I hope this book impresses upon you that in the world as it actually exists today, concentrating on how much food is being produced and how we can produce more is in most cases the wrong focus entirely. As a practical matter, increased production is not necessary in many cases, and in virtually no cases would it be enough on its own. What I will argue, and what we will revisit in the coming chapters, is that by and large the same critiques do not equally apply to several alternate approaches, particularly those focusing on the full suite of human rights, including autonomy and sovereignty. These approaches should occupy the highest place in our priorities, with food production taking less—not none!—of our attention and resources.

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3. If dietary changes and food waste are reasonably addressed, we already have enough food to feed a future projected population of 9–10 billion people This is another statement that is empirically well supported but, of course, complex in its details and implications. The possibility itself can be painted as idly wistful—sure, we could solve our problems if these things were true. (And if wishes were wings, then everyone could fly.) Given that clearly evaluating, and reevaluating, our own beliefs and conclusions is a critical part of scientific practice, we need to admit up front that changing diets and decreasing food waste are not easy or inevitably successful tasks.10 But who said that any part of solving world hunger was going to be easy? Assuredly, making more food, distributing it more fairly, ensuring human rights, and decreasing the environmental damage of our food and agriculture system are all very tall orders. So “Is it easy?” shouldn’t be one of our primary standards of evaluation. There simply are no easy choices here. The far more reasonable questions “Is it possible? Is it feasible?” actually require a considerable bit of analysis. Yet very few analyses to date have seriously compared the feasibility of addressing our problems by “doubling down” on our current industrial food system, as opposed to taking alternate approaches such as supporting the right to food and addressing diet and waste. Now, to the assertion itself. The human population is projected to reach between 9.2 and 10.2 billion people in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. The recommended daily calorie intake of 2,300 calories per person per day, mentioned above, is actually a rough average. There is significant variation around this average based on health, age, activity level, and in the case of women, whether they are pregnant or nursing. Additionally, about a quarter of the world is currently under the age of fifteen, and 12% are sixty years or older, two groups that usually need fewer calories (USHSS and USDA 2015; population figures from UNDESA 2015). At the same time, we have a current dietary energy supply of approximately 2,903 calories per person per day for seven and a quarter billion people (FAO 2015b). On that basis, with no changes to current systems whatsoever, we would in fact have enough food on a calorie basis for approximately 9.14 billion people, slightly below the lower bounds of the projections for 2050. In other words, we very nearly produce enough food for the population of 2050, even with no changes to diet or waste.

Introduction | 17

Such a result can be taken any of several ways. One point of view might see this as little consolation, as global incomes are projected to continue increasing, and historically, consumption of meat has increased fairly consistently with income. (Meaning that food production will fall even farther short because of the higher resource requirements of meat-intensive diets.) From a different perspective, it shows the immense potential we already have to address the problems of hunger, climate change, and loss of natural habitat to agriculture without significant changes to productivity. For example, according to a 2014 study by ecologists David Tilman and Michael Clark, “There would be no net increase in food production emissions if by 2050 the global diet had become the average of the Mediterranean, pescetarian and vegetarian diets” (520). Further, they estimate that the projected increase in food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—from the current 2.27 gigatons of CO2 carbon equivalents per year of food-related emissions to 4.1 gigatons per year in 2050—could be reduced by half a gigaton if only 50% of all crop and food wastage were addressed. This is comparable to removing over a quarter of the world total of emissions from transportation in 2010. Tilman and Clark’s paper is somewhat unique in taking the possibility of large-scale changes to diet and waste seriously. (Though they, too, wonder about the feasibility of such changes.) Their study projects the demands on land use, and the corresponding GHG emissions, if the historical relationships among incomes, meat intensity, and processed diets remain on course. Generally speaking, meat is not terribly food or energy efficient, with ruminants—cows and sheep—being the least energy efficient and most GHG-intensive. In one way, the 1,200 calories lost in this process is not as bad as it may seem. According to geographer Vaclav Smil (2000), the edible crops harvested each year are equivalent to 4,600 calories per person per day. The FAO (2012) estimates that in 2010, this number was 5,359. So we are “only” losing around a quarter of potential calories. On the other hand, 1,200 calories per person per day lost is 41% of the total average global availability of 2,903 calories per person per day. We could have nearly 50% more calories available if we did not feed edible crops to livestock. And alongside the calories lost to animal production, we have around 1,400 calories per person per day lost to waste: 600 calories lost between crop harvest and processing and 800 calories lost while distributing food to markets around the world and lost to household waste (Lundqvist, de Fraiture, and Molden 2008).11 In summary, a reasonable estimate of waste combined with conversion to

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livestock would be that a total of 2,600 calories per person per day is lost from the food system. As optimistic as I may be about the possibilities of change, let me be clear. I am not proposing that we can convert everyone to diets with no meat or that we can recover 100% of waste. But if we go back to our previous calculations—that today’s food supply (after waste and conversion to livestock) could feed approximately 9.1 billion people—what would it take to feed 9.7 billion people (the median estimate for 2050) or 11.2 billion (the median estimate for 2100)? For 9.7 billion people we would need almost 6% more calories in the food system (or equivalently, we would need to recover around 170 calories per person out of the 2,600 calories per person per day lost to livestock conversion and waste). For 11.2 billion people, we would need to recover 650 calories per person per day—or 25% of 2,600 calories per person per day.12 These figures, of course, include a large number of assumptions and say nothing about how food is distributed. After all, making the recommended average of 2,300 calories per person per day available worldwide would obviously not be enough, as we presently have 2,903 calories per person per day alongside between 790 million and 2 billion hungry and food insecure people in the world. But there remains an important takeaway. Addressing the issues of unequal food distribution and making some reasonable dietary changes around meat and food waste seem at least as feasible as calls to increase food production by 60–70%.13 And it is important to remember that proposals focusing on production to address future food needs and ignoring the need to address waste and diet or treating them as secondary are proposals that by definition suggest forging ahead while ignoring avoidable losses of something like 55% of the food supply. Said plainly, “production-first” or “production-only” approaches are absurd in the extreme. 4. Taking the population growth estimates as a given “bakes in” continued oppression of women and rules out effective improvements in gender equality and rights14 We would be hopelessly remiss in our discussion about population if we did not spend a moment reviewing the underlying meaning of the population projections for the next thirty-five to sixty-five years. A significant part of the decrease in population growth rates, where they have occurred, have been tied to increased gender equality and increased access to reproductive control by women alongside the political rights

Introduction | 19

to exercise reproductive (and other) choices (Cuberes and TeignierBaqué 2011). It turns out that many women would choose to have fewer children if they were able to assert the right to choose, had access to the means to exercise that right, and were not under the threat of blatant or subtle retribution from male partners or society at large. The literature here is ample. In a 2014 study, economist Nava Ashraf and her colleagues found that women in Zambia who were given access to contraception when their husbands were present were less likely to use it and over 25% more likely to give birth in the next year. At the same time, women who were able to covertly use birth control were less likely to conceive, but had lower reported well-being, possibly due to “detrimental consequences for the conjugal value of their marriage” (2235) (i.e., real or perceived distrust or disappointment around the deception and failure to conceive). Given that a 25% decrease in Zambia’s fertility rate would take it from the world’s seventh to the thirtysecond highest fertility rate (U.S. CIA 2016), this is not at all insignificant. The average estimated prevalence of “unmet need” for modern contraception in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is 32% (Westoff 2006, 51). Given the physical and mental risks and costs of unwanted pregnancies, empowering women such that their use of contraceptives not only matches their own desires but also permits such programs to be openly engaged in is of clear and compelling importance. This is true not only with respect to women’s own rights and well-being, but also for its relevance to population and consumption questions. The practical significance of these issues represents one of the most compelling examples of the necessity of political ecology, a transdisciplinary field that argues that no understanding of ecology is complete without understanding social power and politics (Robbins 2012). For example, projecting population size would seem to epitomize hard-nosed, objective, and neutral science, yielding estimates based on detailed models and empirical observation of human behavior and trends. At the same time, assuming population growth based on current trends also necessarily assumes flagging or halted progress in advancing women’s rights and access to reproductive control. Such computations are in fact not neutral with respect to people’s actual lives, because they assume a given level of continued oppression: “Sustainability without justice is simply sustained injustice” (Whittaker 2012). To put it in the starkest terms, one may imagine a U.S. social scientist in the early 1850s estimating how many slaves there would be in 1900. Or another scientist, extrapolating in the early 1960s how many women

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would experience marital rape fifty years later, incorporating the parsimonious assumption that it would not or should not be viewed as a crime (which, from the point of view of most U.S. law at the time, it was not). As much as these scientists might “simply” be projecting based on the dominant trends of their time, they would also be “simply” baking the injustices of the time into the proverbial cake. Political ecologists would maintain that at the very minimum, the assumption of continued injustice be made explicit, for example, by prefacing their “neutral” projections with the caveat “assuming we do not address racial or gender inequalities.” Arguably, as a responsible and ethical citizen, a scientist might further take the step of emphasizing that such injustices should and must be addressed, every and any time they make mention of such estimates.15 5. During a typical famine or drought, there is usually enough food regionally or nationally to prevent widespread hunger and starvation One might detect a developing theme. In examining drought and famines, one finds that in many, if not most cases, enough food to prevent the crisis was available even within national borders. The mechanisms that turn a drought—or any other event that disrupts the regular production, utilization, and supply channels—into a famine are in fact routinely political. Or said more rigorously, they are simultaneously political and biogeophysical. There are multiple mechanisms by which a group that is “at risk” actually ends up suffering from a famine. These include the environment in which they live and changes in weather, climate, and the productivity of the land, alongside factors such as the distribution of land and resources, the quality of each to which different people have access, and the rights of different groups to emergency support or redistribution. Correspondingly, one of the primary causes of famine is war, which dramatically disrupts systems of rights, distribution, and access. But with regards to the simplistic and widespread Malthusian notion that famine represents the convergence of too many people and not enough food, the idea has been thoroughly debunked as the general and default mechanism. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen (1981, 1) began his seminal work with the oft-quoted line, “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat. While the latter can be a cause

Introduction | 21

of the former, it is but one of many possible causes” (emphasis in the original). Sen went on to establish that a lack of available food was not the ultimate cause of starvation in many specific cases of famine. Two decades later, Mike Davis pointed out in Late Victorian Holocausts that between the years 1876 and 1900, several waves of famine likely led to the deaths of between thirty and fifty million people in India, China, and Brazil; numbers amounting to some of the greatest tragedies ever recorded. The sheer scale of these events, and their evident preventability, led Davis to argue that the label “holocaust” was no hyperbole. “Absolute scarcity, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889,” writes Davis (2001, 11), “was never the issue.” Research and narratives around other famines have often reached similar conclusions. Though debates continue about many specific cases, most scholars have found that policy choices and sociopolitical power are consistently factors quite capable of dramatically worsening, alleviating, or even bypassing famine (Mukerjee 2014; Ó Gráda 2009; Sen 1981). Davis further argues that the declines in people’s access to food during emergency and famine conditions between 1876 and 1900 can be tied to the forcible conversion of many national economies to the supposedly “open” and “free-market” world system of capitalism. Policies based on the harshest of Malthusian socioeconomic assumptions often weakened or destroyed preexisting systems where cultural traditions (i.e., “moral economies”) had previously obligated those with more food to help the potentially starving during times of want, or where government action had been more responsive to domestic demands than international financial markets. The banal generalities of “market logic” led to newly built railroads shipping food out of hungry communities to people who could pay a better price for it. It led to colonial authorities pushing the indigenous residents into work camps in the belief that the hungry needed to earn their right to live. That workers were thereby put into slavery-like conditions, working for demonstrably inadequate food rations while living in camps that created breeding grounds for rampant disease, was conveniently ignored. In short, policies from foreign and domestic elites, often justified with calls to scientific understanding, turned difficult circumstances into holocaust. More recently, economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda (2009, 244) quoted Liu Shaoqi, a Chinese leader during the mid-twentieth-century Great Leap Forward, that China’s disastrous famine was “three parts nature and seven parts man,” referring to the dominant role sociocultural factors have even when natural factors such as drought and flooding

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prevail. Ó Gráda (2009, 82) notes that a famine-free world depends on “improved governance and peace; it is as simple—or difficult—as that.” But one rarely hears the far-from-catchy slogan “Feed the world through improved governance institutions,” however much it better encapsulates the truth of the matter than, say, the idea that the farmers of Middle America have the responsibility to “feed the world.” As of this writing, the idea that moving towards better institutions is a viable way forward may appear particularly laughable, given the dismaying state of politics in the United States. But, as we will examine throughout this book, this view is not only unwarrantedly cynical, but also represents an abdication of our actual ability to demand and create better institutions throughout the world.

6. In part because we are not reasonably addressing diet and waste, we now have approximately equal numbers of people who are consuming unhealthily large amounts of certain foods and people who are unable to access enough food. More confusing yet, sometimes these people are one and the same The World Health Organization estimates that there are approximately 600 million obese people in the world (WHO 2015).16 Estimates put the size of the world’s undernourished population at around 800 million, with maximum estimates reaching 2 to 2.5 billion (FAO 2015a; Hickel 2016). The numbers of people who are overweight or suffering from micronutrient deficiencies are meanwhile each in the 1–2 billion range. The WHO further observes that it is not uncommon to find undernutrition and obesity co-existing within the same country, the same community and the same household. . . . Children in low- and middle-income countries are more vulnerable to inadequate prenatal, infant, and young child nutrition. At the same time, these children are exposed to high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, energy-dense, and micronutrientpoor foods, which tend to be lower in cost but also lower in nutrient quality. These dietary patterns, in conjunction with lower levels of physical activity, result in sharp increases in childhood obesity while undernutrition issues remain unsolved. (WHO 2015)

That is, it is possible for a household, or even an individual, to quite literally embody the title of food system scholar Raj Patel’s (2008) book, Stuffed and Starved. Both problems are serious. Overweight and obesity are thought to cause 3.4 million deaths per year (around 6.1% of all deaths) (WHO

Introduction | 23

2014). Poor nutrition is thought to cause 3.1 million deaths in children under age five each year alone, nearly half of all children’s deaths, and 5.5% of total deaths (Black et al. 2013). Such avoidable mortality in a world of sufficient food is a form of what has been called structural violence. The tragic results arise out the way the system is currently set up, and not merely specific singular actions by individuals or states (Johnston et al. 2002). As such, it is both harder to viscerally understand the problem and to gather momentum and resources to resolve it. Humans, as a social species, have evolved both biologically and culturally to solve problems, and to find the causes for phenomena that affect our lives. But when the phenomena are caused by a diversity of interrelated causes and cannot be traced to an individual cause or person, it is more difficult—but not impossible—for us to understand and act on the problem. So while we are certainly not all equally responsible for the state of our food systems today, we all bear some level of complicity in the structural violence of our sociopolitical systems, which create wealth and opportunity for some and restrict access and opportunity for others, simply by dint of the accident of the time and location of birth. The co-occurrence of obesity and malnutrition is an excellent example of structural violence. Although each health problem appears a failing of individuals—poor dietary decisions, no exercise, a failure of will—science concludes such individualist explanations are insufficient (Guthman 2011). The fact is that most of us make very similar decisions in particular situations and circumstances. That is to say, institutions have very strong effects on how we behave. In the case of public health, the methods for studying such patterns are marshaled together as the “social determinants of health.” At bottom, it is neither reasonable nor rigorous to ascribe malnutrition to personal choice, or even lack of education, in places where someone might have to work twice as hard to get access to the same diversity and quality of food as others who are more fortunate. If individual will undergirded food choices, we wouldn’t see repeated patterns of increasing obesity around the world. Thus with the exception of a lucky few who are born into the right combination of wealth, place, and culture, we are caught up in institutions that push all of us towards problematic and unhealthy patterns. And these patterns are not a coincidence: they are quite profitable for some people. There are enormous economic incentives aimed at making sugar, salt, and fat relatively cheap. There are few commercial incentives to promote and sell fresher, unprocessed

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food. These dynamics, plus the vast size and influence of many food and agriculture companies and the common co-occurrence of sufficient food and hunger, belie the idea of simplistic “market solutions.” History demonstrates food gravitates to those who can pay for it, rather than who need it, including even those who grow it. Mike Davis and others have found that railroads to isolated rural areas have often shipped food out of colonized areas experiencing hunger. The hungry often have no money to manifest effective demand.17 At the same time, large swaths of the grocery aisle are actually underpriced. Most costs to public health and the environment are not included in food prices, meaning that it is simply impossible for there to be an “efficient” market for food, much less one that is socially just. Heavily processed food—potato chips, breakfast cereals, fast food, and the like—are artificially cheap compared to the health, social, and environmental costs they wreak, allowing large food companies, processors, and restaurants to make money by selling them with most of their true costs hidden. So unhealthy food, produced in ways that cost more than their total revenue value in environmental terms, is sold at artificially low prices, making it more affordable than healthier choices (FAO 2015c; Simon 2006). All the while, consumers are not just eating unhealthy food, but throwing away almost half of it, because it is cheap. Correspondingly, food producers around the world often are pinned to prices that are too low to live on, and are often stuck growing only a small number of “commodity crops,” making them, too, dependent on purchasing cheap food despite being food producers. Thus, a system that both stuffs and starves communities rolls on, reinforcing its contradictions to the benefit of the very few and the harm of the many. 7. Farmers and rural laborers make up most of the world’s hungry—but helping them produce more food will not necessarily make them less hungry In an enduring and tragic irony, most of the world’s hungry people are located in landscapes dedicated to food production (IFAD 2010, 46–47). There are a number of reasons why. Farmers often receive very low prices for what they produce. The costs for inputs such as seeds, labor, land, fertility sources, and pest control are increasing. Production can be low and unstable. A declining proportion of the money spent on food is making it back to farmers (rather than going to processors, retailers, etc.). The investment many governments have made in improving urban

Introduction | 25

life has failed to be matched by investment in rural areas. Rural areas suffer collapsing infrastructure, education, electricity, and socioeconomic opportunity. Economic programs pushed by the world’s wealthier countries on those less economically powerful over the past five decades have often required governments to further decrease their support of such public goods, particularly in rural areas, under “structural adjustment” programs and other elements of what has been called the “Washington Consensus” approach to international development (Weis 2007). The focus on replacing government support with private development has been a disaster for many farmers around the world, and not just in poorer countries. Even in the immensely prosperous United States, the median income from agricultural activities in rural areas is negative for farm households (Prager 2016a, 2016b). Although food-producing households have long had “mixed” economic strategies (i.e., on-farm and off-farm work), worldwide these households have been obligated to depend more on jobs outside of agriculture in order to make ends meet (van der Ploeg 2008). In other words, one of the world’s most fundamentally necessary jobs—producing food—often does not pay enough on its own to be a viable occupation. 8. The majority of the decrease in hunger over the past forty years has not come from increased food production, yield, or availability. Our best estimates are that less than 20% of the decrease in hunger since 1970 is due to the contribution of the increase in the number of calories available There are a variety of proposals addressing how to change the fortunes of rural residents. An exceedingly common one is to increase how much each farmer can produce, particularly in regions that are thought to be failing to produce up to their full potential. While aiding farmers in areas with low productivity is surely an important task, a focus on producing more first and foremost is neither in line with the evidence about the most important levers in decreasing hunger, nor often a path destined for success. A growing scientific literature over the past forty years has pointed to increasing gender equality, particularly in education, and providing access to clean water and basic sanitation as fundamental to improving food security. In what is likely the most comprehensive assessment of changes in food security in the Majority World over the past four decades, development economists Lisa Smith and Lawrence Haddad (2015)

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found that clean water and sanitation were responsible for nearly 40% of the reduction in child malnutrition between 1970 and 2010.18 Female secondary school enrollment and gender equality accounted for 28% of the reduction, (increased) food supply for a bit over 18%, and dietary diversity 15%. In other words, less than 20% of the decline in hunger came from increased food production, yield, or availability. Further, when women and girls have better access to education, political rights, and equal access to agricultural inputs, they tend to improve farm productivity; increase the proportion of resources spent on food security for the household, particularly for children; and often improve environmental practices locally (Agarwal 2009, 2015). However, at the same time it is important to avoid turning such a pattern of improvement into a special responsibility for women to improve all things food, or conversely, to treat rights for women and girls simply as a tool to supposedly improve society. Working for gender equality is both worthy in itself and likely to improve multiple other factors in overall quality of life. Similarly, improved access to clean water and improved sanitation increases health, directly through disease control and indirectly through a greater ability to absorb and retain nutrients. Sanitation also improves the ability of producers to work to their capacity, increases the basic socioeconomic security necessary to invest in diversification and new or more sustainable practices, and substantially improves child health (Chambers and von Medeazza 2013).19 In contrast to these public goods, which are unlikely to be sufficiently provided for by private concerns (Karnani 2011; Rocha 2007), placing productivity first may have mixed results. For one, focusing on increasing how much each farmer can produce is self-contradictory, or at least self-limiting, in one important sense. If all of the poor farmers of the world increased the amount they were producing in the near future, we would quickly see a “treadmill of productivity” (which is discussed in the next chapter). That is, as every farmer succeeded in producing more, the price of what they were selling would decline, all else being equal. And farmers with higher productivity elsewhere have in fact already suffered from their own “success.” For example, the United States has lost four million farmers in the past five decades—with many farms going under and those remaining consolidating into fewer larger farms as a result.20 Each remaining farm still has an incentive to produce far more. As the margin (how much profit they make on each individual unit of production) decreases, most farmers aim to make up the gap by increasing production further still.

Introduction | 27

A reasonable rejoinder would point out that this is an abstract worry. We are not actually in “danger” of simultaneously increasing yields for all of the world’s poor or “underproducing” farmers. However, it remains no reason to accept a productivity-focused approach to improving producer well-being. As we will review in the next chapter, the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s saw dramatic increases in productivity for many farmers, with results that in retrospect were, at best, mixed in terms of well-being for the world’s farmers (Patel 2013). Many farmers who were already better off in property and resources were able to take advantage of these new technologies and approaches, increase their productivity, and prosper, relatively speaking. At the same time, many smaller and poorer farmers either saw lesser benefits or did not benefit at all, and were even driven further into poverty. So we clearly have a precedent that a productivity-first approach may make the wrong difference. Let me make myself clear. I am not saying that producing enough food should never be a concern. Nor am I saying that it is not a prerequisite for food security. Production is part of the foundation for the structure of universal food security and food sovereignty. What I am saying is that as a practical matter, our contemporary food problems are not, in the main, due to insufficient production. More importantly, solutions that focus first or mostly on production are far less likely to improve what we ultimately care about—food security, human dignity, and well-being—than interventions that focus primarily on the full suite of basic human rights.

concluding remarks about a beginning These eight points are aimed at illustrating that there are few, if any, “automatic” solutions to the problems facing us in our food and agriculture systems. We cannot simply say, “Produce more and everyone will benefit.” We cannot just say, “If we had fewer people, those who are the worse off would be better off.” Indeed, even for the most important approaches—those fostering gender equality, education, and access to basic goods such as clean water and improved sanitation—the benefits are not automatic. From place to place, it depends on how we support such interventions. Just passing a law saying girls have the right, or obligation, to attend as much school as boys is not synonymous with fulfilling the right or obligation. Making women equal in law does not make it so in custom. And changing customs, which does happen, does not take place in the same way, or have the same effects, everywhere.

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Insofar as the best solutions for ending hunger everywhere in the world, once and for all, are different from secondary (but important) tools such as increasing productivity, it is because they deal with institutions. Institutions, as I have emphasized, are big, nearly invisible, perniciously influential, and hard to change. But they do, in fact, change, whether through gradual evolution or intentional action. In fact, they are always changing. Where this happens as a result of deliberate action, whether that is changing a family rule or founding a country, what makes the difference is who gets to decide what these changes might look like, and who goes along with the change or resists it. I have spent this introduction attempting to underline the vital importance of thinking about how we think, and about how we know what we think we know. It is, for instance, within our reach to end hunger in the world. It likely has been within our reach for a while now. But the challenges we must surmount to achieve this are fundamentally, essentially, institutional. We have designed neither our national nor international systems to accomplish food security and end hunger. In fact, we, as individual nations and international organizations, have chosen to give higher priority to other objectives, whether this be trade and the freedoms of multinational corporations, notions of “modernity” and “progress” that minimize the role of agriculture, or adherence to certain convictions about the role of government and the place and capacity of the private sector. We now have international philanthrocapitalism (think Bill Gates or Richard Branson) in place of international institutions with enforcement capacity. We have embraced charity covering the damage of the status quo over changes of discernible impact. Yet few of us have directly had a say in these choices. Our “embrace” of our changing institutions has been born of reluctance, detachment, false hope, or a feeling of impotence. We, the greater population of the world, have not been informed of or offered multiple alternatives, and we largely have not been asked to directly participate in reforming national and international governance systems that can minimize or eliminate structural violence. Yet there is no reason we cannot imagine and pursue these possibilities. All new institutions may appear impossible, until seemingly suddenly, there they are. Think of the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of U.S. slavery, the global rise of representative democracy, the end of many monarchies and colonial empires, the right to vote for women and minorities, and the implementation of the National Health Service in Britain or (tenuously at the time of this writing) the Affordable Health Care Act in the United States. All of these are one part of institutional

Introduction | 29

changes of various means and magnitudes. But each of them also actually only acted as the change in the “visible” rulebook, while the improvements that came after them were a manifestation of changes in social pressure, attitude, culture, and institutions. The significant turning points above represent only middle points in continuing changes in how we decide how we will govern ourselves. Just as it is hard, but not impossible, to break from traditions and to establish new ones, institutions change every day. Those who have already amassed or inherited great influence upon these institutions may have a head start on most of us. At the same time, our institutions determine how and when they might exercise their power and privilege. We can set up new systems of accountability. We can build the institutions for universal food security. Sounds utopian, you say? Well, of course it is. At the same time, the dream is not for “utopia”—which literally means “no-place,” as pointed out by Thomas Prugh and coauthors in their 2000 book The Local Politics of Global Sustainability. In it, Prugh and his colleagues analyzed how a “utopia” was too stultifying and static a vision for how a better world can be constituted. Utopia, they say, imagines arriving at a better world like it is a given, unchanging location, instead of the necessary act of continuously creating a better world, which involves processes for learning, adapting, and changing in response to growing knowledge and shifting circumstances. Thus, Prugh and colleagues argue, we need to envision the necessity of a fuller democracy that, by its very inclusiveness and participatory nature, is capable of generating better and more just institutions for all. This is no mere optimism or faith, but hope paired with evidence. We see thousands, even millions of innovations in institutions around the world. We see new frameworks and modes of thought about food security and hunger (Carlson and Chappell 2015). We see countries such as Brazil achieving notable successes and dramatic steps forward, albeit inevitably incomplete and, without continuing activity by citizens, possibly impermanent. So I don’t aim to convince you that we can reach the end of the path, whether unchanging utopia or Prugh et al.’s continuously adapting “genotopia.” Rather I hope to convince you that each of us can help our societies take the next step, and, once taken, the one that follows, and so on. Maybe these steps won’t take us all the way to the utopian or genotopian “end.” But as acts of active optimism, each small step potentially represents the liberation of millions from hunger, and an increase in their, and our, ability to work together to scale the final hills.

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The case of Belo Horizonte, the Brazilian city that is at the forefront of food security innovations and the focus of this book, is not one of unmitigated success. It does not “prove” that we can get to the end of world hunger. Innovations are at one and the same time incremental and revolutionary. The Wright brothers’ historic first flight in Kitty Hawk showed that human flight was possible, opening the way for hobby-kit aircraft, commercial airliners, supersonic jets, and the space shuttle. What it emphatically did not show was that controlled human flight in a heavier-than-air craft could happen only on barrier islands, along the Atlantic Ocean, on Thursday mornings, in winter, at a maximum of seven miles per hour. Their flights required a lot of people to (re)think what they knew, how they knew it, and how to gauge new possibilities and a world that might be built. Understanding the research that came before them was key to the Wright brothers’ success, and understanding what they did and how they changed what we thought we knew was key to human flight thereafter. We owe ourselves and our food futures nothing less than the kinds of good examples we see today in fighting, lessening, and ending hunger. We have the materials, the technology, and the possibilities. We need only the will and willingness to struggle for the change to today’s institutions, to learn from yesterday’s research and today’s innovations, and to stand up to entrenched interests and institutions that are not yet willing or able to change. But change always happens. The difference lies only in who has input into what that change means and who it helps— or fails to help—to achieve a better life. Hunger is still needlessly common. In chapter 2, I will review the details and evolution of frameworks for analyzing hunger, from the Malthusianist productivism I have rebuked here, through Amartya Sen’s Nobel Prize–winning contributions, to nutrition economist Cecilia Rocha’s “Five A’s of Food Security,” to current discussions of food sovereignty and food justice. Those very familiar with these discourses may wish to skip this chapter, though it may be helpful to skim as my somewhat idiosyncratic approach to these frameworks will help guide us as we proceed through the rest of the book. As we will learn in chapter 3, Belo Horizonte (BH) has been home to one of the world’s most successful food security programs since 1993. Infant malnutrition and mortality have been cut by more than 50%. Fruit and vegetable consumption has gone up. BH’s comprehensive approach targeted, and made progress in, food security in highrisk populations, increased food access citywide, and used city pro-

Introduction | 31

grams to support local agriculture and improve farmer livelihoods. In the process, Belo Horizonte has invented and reinvented many food security institutions. These institutions draw on past analyses and efforts, but also show glimpses of how a future without hunger may be possible. Chapter 3 presents a review of how food security analysis and proposed solutions developed and changed in Brazil between World War I and 1993, when BH’s food programs began. I next present a detailed narrative account of how the innovative food security policies of BH came to be conceived of and implemented, particularly in terms of the Food Security Secretariat’s origin out of an analysis closely paralleling the Five A’s framework, followed by an analysis of why some of BH’s programs have been incredibly successful and others less so. In chapter 4, I address the gap in explanations of how BH came to put its ambitious policy agenda into place: What allows institutional change to happen? I will introduce the “multiple streams approach” (MSA) to policy analysis, pioneered by political scientist John Kingdon in his book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (2010).21 Using this framework, and based on archival evidence and original interviews, I will elaborate upon the origins of BH’s programs. I will explore how the programs came to be, out of the confluence of public attention to the problem of food security, the presence of innovative policy ideas to address food security, and the politics of the moment that supported the implementation of these policies. This includes an explanation of the concepts of “policy windows” and “policy entrepreneurship,” and how they played into BH’s programming. Lastly, I will discuss some of the larger implications and limits of BH’s Secretariat. In chapter 5 I will discuss how BH’s food system planners defined support for small farmers as an objective, and how those logistics tie into farmers’ and planners’ shared understanding of the role agriculture played in promoting—or eroding—biodiversity in the Atlantic rainforest surrounding BH. Specifically, BH’s planners saw such projects in “Support for Production and Commercialization” as a way to (a) lower the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables for urban consumers; (b) provide small, local family farmers with higher prices for their produce; (c) create a model for one way to address the rapid urbanization of Brazil and the pressures this places on cities’ resources; and (d) support more ecological and environmentally friendly practices in the biodiverse regions around the city. The chapter continues to draw on my experiences in BH since 2003, particularly interviews and field research conducted between

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2004 and 2013 in city offices and across the farms and forest fragments in the surrounding countryside. It presents my findings regarding the economic livelihoods and practices on area farms, the sociopolitical context and effects of BH’s programs, and the potential effects of BH on biodiversity in the local rainforest. Finally, the chapter connects BH’s case with broader socioeconomic theory and the current state of evidence around the pressures facing the world’s smallholder farmers. What, after all, are the economic and environmental opportunities represented by supporting smallholder farmers? Finally, chapter 6 summarizes the policy lessons of the book with regards to BH’s successes, failures, and limits. It explores the value of applying critical, dialectical thought and academic theory in helping us understand the programs’ creation, development, triumphs, and limitations. I will also extrapolate from BH’s successes and Brazil’s Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) programs to offer tentative recommendations on how to translate these experiences into beginning to end hunger and environmentally destructive agriculture in the United States and elsewhere. Within the MSA framework, and out of my own experiences in the U.S. food movement over the past fifteen years as both an academic and a policy advocate, I will further show how the lessons of BH can help in breaking down the U.S. food system into matters of public will (“problems”), political calculation (“politics”), and technical policy solutions (“policies”). As observed by the political economist Judith Tendler, and reiterated by one of my mentors, Cecilia Rocha, there is an imbalance in the literature favoring analyses of negative policy experiences over positive ones, leading to faulty models and prescriptions (Tendler 1997, in Rocha 2009). “Despite many limitations,” Rocha writes, “there have been some important advances in the area of food and nutrition security policy in Brazil in recent years which deserve attention. Other parts of the world may want to consider what lessons can be derived from this experience, its challenges and successes” (2009, 63). In this book I aim to contribute to that objective, not just to consider what lessons have been learned, but to envision how these can be used to help efforts elsewhere to pivot toward next steps to end all hunger. Such a vision may seem daft, or even, to some, dangerous. But it is presented in the spirit of the great systems thinker Donella Meadows, whose work has been instrumental in my own intellectual development. Meadows (1996) wrote that “vision has an astonishing power to open the mind to possibilities I would never see in a mood of cynicism. Vision

Introduction | 33

widens my choices, shows me creative new directions. It helps me see good-news stories, pockets of reality that could be seeds of a wider vision. I see what I should support; I get ideas for action” (para. 23). The devil in is the details, of course, but vision and action are the necessary means by which we will be able to shape a future defined by universal food sovereignty, food security, and food justice.

chapter 2

Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Beginning to End Hunger

Estimates put the number of malnourished people today at approximately 800 million, or about 11% of the world’s population, although this estimate is contested, with some experts arguing that 2 billion is a more accurate estimate (Hickel 2016). The number of people suffering from what is called “hidden hunger” (insufficient intake of vital nutrients needed in small quantities) is likely between 1 and 2 billion. Meanwhile, an estimated 600 million people suffer from obesity, and 1 to 2 billion people are putatively overweight.1 Six hundred million. Eight hundred million. One billion. Two billion. Astounding numbers. While there is significant overlap between these groups, we can nonetheless say that almost half of the human population may be suffering from food-related (and eminently avoidable) ill health. Acute malnutrition, for example, decreases energy available for work, childcare, and even leisure, while imposing an ongoing “mental load” around worrying about where a next meal will come from. And not only does a malnourished person have less energy to do work, but also the deprivation their body is suffering weakens the immune system and makes it harder to fight off illness (Chandra 1997). In the case of acute famine, it is a difficult task to separate deaths from “only” starvation from those caused by changes in behavior and weakened immune systems (Davis 2001). If one does fall ill, the energy and expense shelled out for care and treatment will deduct from the resources otherwise put towards 34

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procuring food, finding work, or working.2 Obesity is also correlated with risks for many other noncommunicable diseases, including diabetes, coronary heart disease, and certain forms of cancer. The micronutrient deficiencies that characterize hidden hunger can cause stunting and mental retardation in children and lead to long-term negative health effects in adulthood, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes (Caulfield et al. 2006). And despite some very important debates on the definition, measurement, usefulness, and accuracy of the term “overweight,” diets associated with being overweight are also correlated with numerous other health risks, including changes to the community of helpful bacteria we all carry around in our gut known as the microbiome (Myles 2014). Even in a world without sufficient food to feed every adult and child, the co-occurrence of obesity and food insecurity would seem a cruel joke. But in our world of relative plenty, as examined in the last chapter, the coincidence shocks the conscience. Our model of food production may have something to do with this painful irony. The frequent focus on producing ever more food tends toward increasing yields from monocrops. Fields and farm systems are populated with only one type of plant or livestock animal, as far as the eye can see. It is patently clear, then, that a surplus of calories at the global level and insufficient dietary diversity—a primary cause of hidden hunger—cannot be fixed by growing more calories of a couple of major crops. In a concession to the possible problems of this model, adding nutrients to single crops, in what is known as “biofortification,” is often proposed as an alternate technofix in order to “square the circle.” At the risk of stretching the metaphor, given that we already have more than enough “squares” available (warehouses of sufficient food and the ability to diversify new production), an alternate approach would be to simply find ways to make use of what we have, rather than engaging in billions of dollars of research around externalizing such a systemic contradiction onto people around the world. The diversity of food and food cultures globally has been notably declining in comparison to much of our species’ history, with a couple of foods (mainly grains) crowding out many locally and regionally important varieties (Khoury et al. 2014, but see Montenegro de Wit 2016). While we certainly would not want to mimic all the habits of our ancestors, it would be both logical and more efficient to take the best of the ideas, practices, and varieties that make up our collective heritage. The problem is, as researchers have pointed out, variety and diversity in

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a commoditized agriculture are treated as nonconformity from the perspective of a food processor, and as such can constitute a cost rather than a benefit (van der Ploeg 2008). But insofar as you can breed, manufacture, and select out variation, you can optimize industrial food system processes. So for instance, monocrops are economically a boon for the large corporations, equipment manufacturers, and food processors that dominate our food system, even as they exact serious costs on ecosystems and require costly measures to maintain, such as the “leaky” and wasteful use of synthetic fertilizers and the growing application of synthetic pesticides.3 In fact, our simplified, monocultured food system is “profitable” only insofar as we fail to take into account many of the less obvious costs, from increased pest problems, lower dietary diversity, and lower biodiversity more generally (Chappell et al. 2013; FAO 2015c; Pretty et al. 2001).4 In other words, we could choose the best of existing and previously used methods that depend on diversity and resilience rather than synthetic inputs and imported nutrients, or we could continue to spend more resources trying to “biofortify” and prop up a flawed system. A last initial observation revolves around the nature of ongoing chronic malnutrition as opposed to immediate famines. Even during most famines, there is sufficient food to meet the acute needs of the afflicted population (recall Rule 5 for understanding global food systems in the Introduction). The same is the case of most chronic malnutrition within countries, and is certainly true at the global level (Rules 1 and 2). In this way, famines and chronic malnutrition are similar: each circumstance is a different face of the same structural violence of existing social structures and ongoing inequalities. As Alexander de Waal, a noted analyst of conflict and famines, puts it, discussing his extensive research in Sudan: Who defines an event as a “famine” is a question of power relations within and between societies. . . . “Hunger” is something that one simply puts up with. Satisfying the pangs of hunger is not a major concern for faminestricken families. Even during the worst of the famine, households spent only a fraction of their potential income on food. Their priority was instead to preserve their way of life, to avoid destitution. (2005, 6–7)

A similar struggle is clearly the case for many people trying to survive through chronic malnutrition, and other “lesser” forms of food insecurity. Indeed, the mental gymnastics the poor have to conduct in order to maintain a minimum standard of living, and any potential to improve it, may require so much of their intellectual “real estate” as to add a

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significant burden on the already burdened (Mani et al. 2013; Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). But above all, notice de Waal’s emphasis on the “question of power.” As we continue here, such a question will prove fundamental to efforts aimed at ending hunger. Any analysis of hunger that refuses the issue of power is incapable of truly addressing the problem. Any approach that does not directly face inequality is destined to fail, even as ending hunger is also imminently within our grasp. When one accepts the predominant roles structural violence and inequality play in explaining chronic hunger, hidden hunger, famine, and obesity, two deductions follow: (1) the popular approaches to fighting hunger are shown to be partial, incomplete, or even downright destructive, and (2) a sense of helplessness can set in. If we must solve poverty to address food morbidities, are we not setting ourselves an impossible task? There are a variety of ways of responding to this kind of demoralization. When we take a broader look at research on food and agricultural systems, the challenges before us become easier in key ways. (To be sure, they also become harder in other ways.) The benefit of an alternate approach is that the solutions to the problems are suddenly imminently possible. Right off, lumping together the illnesses associated with our current food system in terms of a dearth of food, the wrong diet, and too much of the wrong food makes an initial analysis easier. By dint of sharing a common set of causes, these problems become, relatively speaking, a bit easier because they will not require taking mutually exclusive steps to address them; they share a conceptual framework. If food issues arise from the same or related inequalities, they can be simultaneously addressed to a great extent by the same measures. This insight bolsters two analytic frameworks that will undergird much of my reasoning in this book. The first, the Five A’s of Food Security, was developed by food and nutrition economist Cecilia Rocha. It improves on the vague and usually insufficient notion of hunger and the traditional definitions of food security by encompassing the multiple dimensions of food production, access, and political necessities. The second, food sovereignty, was coined approximately two decades ago in order to address the perceived lack of a political dimension in the traditional definition of food security. In this chapter, we will map the long road to the two approaches. As touched upon in the first chapter, some version of the eighteenthcentury political economist Thomas Malthus’s ideas has held sway in both the popular imagination and the halls of power for much of the last

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two centuries. Hunger and famine, caused by the inability of food production to keep up with human reproduction, means that the only solution to hunger is to decrease the number of people—through deprivation and starvation, if necessary. The fact that this did not actually explain circumstances observed in the decades after Malthus’s death—including 1840s Ireland and 1870s India—was conveniently “unknown” to the dominant paradigm, a particular twist on the idea that “knowledge is power.” Turning that phrase on its head, in the case of hunger and public action, power became knowledge in that power dictated what was to be known. It was known that the solution to problems of population and hunger were to have fewer of “them.” “Their” identity has been conveniently malleable over time, of course, able to encompass the poor of one’s own country, foreign residents, people under colonial rule, or other classes and castes, depending on the political conveniences of the day.5 These, after all, are the people who are hungry, and so clearly there are too many of them (not “us,” given that “we” are not starving). This is a manifestation of power as knowledge because the “facts” that held sway among many members of the ruling classes ended up becoming the official, scientifically valid consensus. But however earnest Malthusian research and theories may have been, the field of study was quite clearly racist in both its unspoken presumptions and articulated conclusions, and biased to the favor of its own culture and class. The benefits to the already comfortable of an approach that did not require redistributing resources to help the poor and hungry would seem to go a long way towards explaining why Malthus’s theories were what became fact and embraced over alternatives. For example, there are the ideas of polymath Marquis de Condorcet, Malthus’s contemporary to whom we were briefly introduced in the Introduction. His conclusions would seem equally plausible, conceived by an intellectual equal. Condorcet essentially reasoned that people could be reasoned with. Malthus, essentially, asserted that certain kinds of people could not be dissuaded from overpopulating short of the threat of acute deprivation and starvation. Malthus clearly applied the conclusion only to certain kinds of people, contrasting civilized upper-class European behavior with that of “savages” from other continents and poor Europeans. Although the assertion that certain kinds of people must be starved into making proper decisions is rarely openly voiced today, and its racism would be acknowledged by many, much of the contemporary food discourse still implicitly follows Malthus’s assumptions. Overpopulation is

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often pointed to as being “too taboo” to touch, and this faith in its taboo nature is taken to explain why it isn’t a larger part of the food system conversation. On the other hand, the idea that more food for the hungry simply allows them to keep having too many (hungry) children has rarely played out that way, and certainly not according to that simplistic principle (cf. Graham and Boyle 2002). The conceptual conflict can be seen in the contemporary focus on providing enough food for all the people— and their increasingly meat-heavy diets—that are projected by 2050 to 2100. It is nice to see we have progressed to where the problem with “them” is not widely assumed to be their simple inability to stop having unprotected sex (and therefore children). We still, however, have some version of that assumption with us, in that it seems there are far more calls for increasing food production (which in Malthusian logic would be a counterproductive stopgap measure) in order to have enough food for all the children that we will inevitably have. That is, we have “progressed” to including our own apparently voracious appetites for childbearing and food as part of the problem alongside the issue of “them.” But plenty of analyses do still exhibit some version of the we bono fallacy, wherein the environmental effects and difficulties to meet the demand of increased population and consumption are posed as problems of the “them” in Africa and Asia, where population growth is fastest. The fact that “we,” in this case the economically advantaged residents within Europe, Australia, the United States, Canada, and Japan, already consume much more than our share, and produce a disproportionate amount of the environmental destruction from consumption and waste, is removed from the equation with expedient hand-waving. In other words, when I see per capita consumption data along the lines of table 1, my impulse, as someone with training in both ecology and engineering, is entirely different from demands that “we really need to cut down world environmental impact and resource use by getting Indians and the Chinese to have fewer children!” Instead, I agree with political ecologist Paul Robbins (2012, 16) that “overpopulation, to the extent that such a thing exists on a global or regional scale, appears to be a problem strictly of smaller, wealthier populations, especially the United States, rather than the apparently larger populations of the global south.” Any passing notion of justice and food security should preclude propositions that one might summarize as “the way for each Indian to have more access to food is to keep food the same and decrease the number of Indians.” In essence, starting out with our actual goals in mind—our ends—and working backwards to what we ought to do to accomplish them—our

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table 1.

resource use compared

Per capita energy consumption (kg of oil equivalent) Per capita freshwater withdrawals (cubic meters) Per capita CO2 emissions (metric tons) Per capita meat consumption (kg per year)

India

China

United States

624 (2012)

2,143 (2012)

6,815 (2012)

595 (2013)

408 (2013)

1,512 (2013)

1.7 (2011)

6.7 (2011)

17.0 (2011)

3.69 (2013)

61.82 (2013)

117.61 (2011)

source: Conceptually based on Table 1.2 in Robbins (2012); original data from World Bank (2016) and FAOSTAT (2009b/2016). note: Numbers in parentheses reflect the year of data collection.

means—would imply two working principles. First, that in order to address the environmental damage, climate-change impacts, and encroachment of agriculture onto threatened natural habitats, the (over)consumption of the world’s wealthiest consumers is the most pertinent and easiest lever to move to lessen global impact. The second implication is that in order to address hunger, we would do well to support access to existing food, and, where a lack of infrastructure, education, clean water, and empowerment blocks access to food or its sufficient production, we should invest in improving infrastructure, education, access to clean water, and empowerment.6 Solutions to long-standing global problems involving billions of people are rarely so simple to implement, it is true. But the traditionally emphasized solutions—with their Neo-Malthusian focus on reducing reproductive rates and increasing agricultural productivity—are just as difficult in practice as any alternative. In fact, as we will see in the next section of this chapter, achieving those two goals actually may not solve the problems with which we are concerned. Which, one need admit, is about the most damning flaw a solution can have. As food system scholars Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins (2015, 33) point out, “We cannot waste time with approaches that do not work.” Here we will analyze the causes and dynamics ourselves—and come to new conclusions altogether different from conventional approaches. In other words, effective solutions must address the actual causes of a problem. Poor and hungry communities do not “just exist.” These communities are no result of some cosmic lottery from which they drew the short end. This would be true even if they were poor and food insecure

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simply because there weren’t enough food and other resources to go around. Human history clearly shows some groups accumulate favors and resources that are rolled over across generations. Other groups with less sociopolitical power, in contrast, are pushed into, and kept in, marginalized conditions. The idea, for example, that some groups prosper more than others because their members exhibit more merit—skills, ability, intelligence, gumption, what have you—is one possible hypothesis. But that deduction is consistently contradicted by careful analysis, and in the majority of cases seems to be a result of fallacious we bono reasoning.7 Geographer Neil Adger (2006, 270) points out that “vulnerability is driven by inadvertent or deliberate human action that reinforces selfinterest and the distribution of power in addition to interacting with physical and ecological systems.” We will return to the limits of we bono reasoning shortly in the context of political economies of food and agriculture systems. But first, given all the critiques we have explored of the way agrifood systems are currently organized and analyzed, let us ask: What approach might then best be deployed to analyze hunger, agriculture, and their effects on people and the environment?

from food productivism to security and sovereignty As we have reviewed, contemporary hunger and famine are not usually the result of insufficient food or production. As geographer Jesse Ribot (2014, 696) says of vulnerability, it “resides in the pre-hazard precarity of people.” The precariousness of the social, economic, and political rights of a group determines their vulnerability—here, vulnerability to hunger—rather than merely the matter of the environment in which people find themselves or the quantity of food available. Along with the environment and characteristics of food production and availability, such rights (or their absence), determine when people might go hungry or suffer from the extreme deprivation of famine. We need to recall Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen’s (1981) insight that a lack of food availability is only one of many possible causes of starvation. Sen’s findings have crucially shaped analyses of food systems since. His entitlement framework has at one and the same time been elaborated upon by decades of supporters and critics, and failed to be incorporated into popular consciousness, food security policy, and even many scientific analyses. Major institutions grappling with famine and aid have neither fully embraced Sen’s framework, nor

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incorporated the refinements that have been built around it (Rubin 2009). The grand narrative (or “tendency”) about fighting hunger has not changed much over the past sixty years, despite the challenges Sen’s analysis posed to it in 1981. The productivist narrative has guided how the mainstream views the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s and is a direct corollary of the framing Sen identified, and critiqued, as “food availability decline.”

first tendency: productivism, food availability decline, and neo-productivism Sen and his successors have fought to replace the long-held default framework for explaining famine: food availability decline (FAD). Although FAD, strictly speaking, is not meant to deal with endemic or chronic malnutrition, it has an obvious connection to the notion that sublethal hunger is caused by an ongoing lack of sufficient food production. Thus we will group productivism, FAD, and what I will call neo-productivism together under the same tendency as they share a common worldview about hunger and starvation that focuses on how much food is produced.8 The flaws of both the productivist and FAD frameworks have already been discussed at length, but it is worth noting the challenges the narrative presents (as well as an apt return to the concept of cui bono). Who stands to benefit from a narrative that insists more food production is needed? One obvious answer is the current industrial agricultural system’s major players. Input companies (e.g., seed, fertilizer, and pesticide manufacturers) as well as food processors, distributors, and retail companies are increasingly concentrated, squeezing farmers between oligopolies and oligopsonies (Howard 2016). That is, there are too few sellers of agricultural inputs and too few buyers of farmers’ products, leading farmers to pay more for their inputs than is fair or economically efficient and getting less money for their products than is fair or efficient. As has been pointed out by a diversity of figures, from the former United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter to farming activist Brad Wilson, agricultural economist Daryll Ray, and commodities investment consultant Richard Brock, overproduction and low prices are often the “real” problem facing struggling farmers (Brock 2015; De Schutter 2015; Ray, De La Torre Ugarte, and Tiller 2003; Wilson 2014; see also Wise 2004). De Schutter’s 2015 piece in the journal Foreign Policy bore the provocative title “Don’t Let Food Be the Problem: Producing Too Much Food Is What Starves the Planet.” Growing

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too much food may be bad for farmers, but it is immensely profitable for the corporate concerns selling ever-more inputs, and buying ever-cheaper agricultural products. A permanent oversupply is the gift that keeps on giving for these industries, because of the well-known “treadmills” on which many a farmer finds her- or himself running. As each farmer adopts a new technology that allows them to produce more, prices will be driven down by the greater supply. However, for a variety of reasons, it is hard for any individual farmer to choose to ramp down production. In fact, farmers will usually increase their production however they can to make up for the lower prices they are getting for each unit they produce, which simply exacerbates the problem at both the individual and group levels. In other words, farmers must run faster and faster to stay in the same place, as you would on an accelerating treadmill. This dynamic has been repeatedly empirically observed in farmers’ accelerated and broadened use of fertilizers, land, seeds, and pesticides. In fact, agricultural economists have discussed these challenges as elements of the so-called farm problem for at least seventy-five years. The mainstream view identifies the problem as “low and unstable incomes, generated by the particular economic structure of the agricultural economy” (Gardner 1992), arising from the tendency in agriculture to overproduce. More specifically, many observers have pointed out that the usual capitalistic assumptions around how industries work often do not work in the case of farming. For example, it is difficult to save money by ramping down production when prices are low. Farmers still have to pay for all of their land, even if they’re not growing on all of it. Many farmers are paying back debt on land or equipment loans. Falling behind on paying these debts would be costlier than accepting low prices. Others have to buy inputs and raise their crops or livestock months before they know what the prices will be when they sell it. Leaving the farm because it is unprofitable typically means leaving the industry entirely, moving the family to a new location, and entering a new line of work. In other words, when in most industries you might see declining production in response to lower prices, in agriculture they often spur individual farmers to produce more in order to gain back whatever money they can, compounding the very problem farmers seek to escape.9 Despite its detrimental effects on farmers, prevalent overproduction helps explain the persistence of the productivist narrative, specifically its propagation by the companies and classes that benefit from it. Further, it is unclear that increasing productivity will decrease the hunger or poverty of the rural residents of the Majority World (Schnurr 2017),

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who make up 70% of the poor and hungry and largely depend directly or indirectly on farming to make a living (IFAD 2010, 46–47). It’s important to remember that alongside the treadmill effects we touched on, farmers increasingly do not grow food for their own consumption. Many crops are export bound and others are sold for feed for animals or fuel, or are nonfood crops such as cotton. More broadly, a large body of research has argued that most farmers are net food buyers. They may consume some of their own production, but need to purchase food as well, based on the income they make from agriculture and nonfarm employment. It remains inconclusive as to whether farmers who increase the productivity of food for their own consumption can significantly improve their diets. A large literature within primary research and government policy assumes that the only good way to help farmers improve their livelihoods is to help them grow more cash crops meant solely for sale in the global market. There are undeniable benefits to increasing your income, but whether that is the only way to benefit poor farmers is far from obvious. All this said, the productivist framing does not automatically mean farmers are the only possible beneficiaries of increased production. The low prices that cause problems for many farmers are treated as boons for urban consumers, particularly the poor. Cheap food makes it easier for households in cities to budget and get by, by “giving” them more income to spend on other items. But as we shall shortly explore, that expectation is not necessarily supported by data. Still, the fact that the productivist framework breaks down where an oversupply of food and hunger co-occur, as is the case in the United States (see Rule 2 in the Introduction), doesn’t mean that it can’t explain food dynamics elsewhere. It might still apply reasonably well for a place that suffers from one of the highest rates of infant malnutrition in the world. India, for example, accounts for nearly 25% of the low-end estimate of 800 million hungry in the world and has a shocking rate of infant stunting of nearly 40% (von Grebmer et al. 2015). One would be tempted to assume that a failure in production is a key element of the problem. Using reasoning very similar to FAD, which is routinely bandied about upon the onset of famines, productivism would suggest that hunger in India is traceable to persistent undersupply from insufficient production, and therefore would be fixed by increasing production. (We might think of FAD’s analogue in this case to be PUS: persistent under-supply.) But just as the evidence shows that FAD is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation for famine, underproduction is not the underlying

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cause of most cases of ongoing hunger. We looked at this in some detail in the Introduction, but in this case we can see it fails as a broader explanatory framework and not just in isolated exceptions. In India we find that there is in fact an estimated average of 2,459 calories per person per day of food available, after accounting for preconsumer waste and trade balances (FAO 2009b/2016). This should mean, at the very least, that affordable food is available for urban consumers. And indeed, the Indian government, like many governments, pursues a cheap food strategy to ease the burdens on poor workers, which also allows companies to pay lower wages without sparking violent revolt.10 So, in line with productivist logic, and perhaps in spite of the presence of more than enough food on average, it would seem necessary to boost production even further, lowering prices to expand access to food. Yet, as we saw in Rule 8 of the first chapter, a rather direct critique emerges out of the research examining the decreases in hunger in the Majority World since 1970. Lisa Smith and Lawrence Haddad (2015) show that less than 20% of the reduction seen in child stunting in that period was related to increasing food supplies, with this proportion dropping to less than 5% in South Asia. For South Asia, the researchers found, while continued improvements in women’s education and food availabilities are needed, three of the determinants should be of particular focus: access to sanitation, dietary diversity of the food available in countries, and gender equality . . . [N]ational food availability does not feature near the top of the priorities for accelerating undernutrition reductions in either South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. This does not reduce the importance of maintaining adequate food supplies, including food production, but simply acknowledges that the scope for it to reduce stunting prevalences is lower than that of the priority underlying determinants we have identified. (197–98, emphasis added)

In the case of India, the point regarding dietary diversity is particularly well taken, given that India’s “relative oversupply” of nearly 2,500 calories per person per day is deceiving. As various observers have noted, it is an oversupply of cheap grains for export, not the variety of grains and other foodstuffs that might otherwise be grown for domestic consumption.11 Whereas productivism focuses on addressing putative deficits in food production and availability by increasing production, neo-productivism as I use the term here assimilates the substantial body of evidence and theory produced since Sen’s Poverty and Famines (1981) that links hunger more to poverty and sociocultural power than to food supply. In

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acknowledging that poverty is a prime cause of hunger, and that most of the world’s hungry are farmers and farmworkers, neo-productivism posits that the best way to decrease hunger is to raise the incomes of farmers, by raising their productivity. Simultaneously, evoking the productivism of yore, by increasing food supply and decreasing food prices, poor urban residents ought to benefit as well. But again, the simplistic proposals of productivism, however they are repackaged, are typically undermined by reality. The empirical evidence has repeatedly shown that the technological advances of the Green Revolution often shifted the resulting benefits to non-poor and marginally poor farmers (Patel 2013).12 This is no surprise. The Green Revolution required disproportionate increases in relatively expensive inputs. Even as the global amount of agricultural production per capita increased by 11% between 1966 and 1985, and total cereal production increased by 60%, fertilizer use skyrocketed by 150% (FAO 2016). Pesticide use (in the United States at least) rose by 100% (Osteen and Szmedra 1989). The very poorest farmers, then, were unable to keep pace on such a production treadmill. We can see this dynamic play out directly in U.S. agriculture, as studies have shown that the cash spent on inputs has steadily increased, which some observers read as being compensated by the productivity gains that allowed some farmers to maintain their income (Zulauf and Rettig 2013). But as we have discussed, as productivity rises and prices drop, farmers’ profits for each unit of production drop too, making it harder for smaller farmers to get by. And so the mass exodus from farming seen around the world, and the much-commented-on “urbanization” of the human population, results in a countryside empty of people. Abandoned farms are left to the wilds of secondary succession or (more commonly) are consolidated by neighboring farmers or bought out by conglomerates (Sloan 2007). Under neo-productivist logic, the farmers unable to scale up and scale out to respond to the demands of the treadmill of production must make way for more efficient farmers. In migrating to the cities they provide inexpensive labor benefiting urban industries, driving economic growth, and lifting the fortunes of everyone. It is unfortunate—or, for those of the other side of cui bono, fortunate—that such theoretical expectations rarely work out quite this way. Increased productivity need not drive actual wage growth, as wage stagnation in the United States since the early 1970s shows. Worker productivity has increased between six and eight times more than the increase in wages in the same time period.13 City infrastructures and job markets, already overburdened and facing

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enormous challenges in alleviating existing poverty, have been stretched further by the population influx. The world’s cities, what Mike Davis (2006) has characterized as a “planet of slums,” are ill suited to absorb further mass immigration, which threatens to replace rural poverty and hunger with urban poverty and hunger. Even should those farmers left behind in rural areas quickly converge upon universally producing to their maximum potential—eliminating so-called yield gaps—food prices would plummet, pushing still more farmers and farmworkers off the land and into cities.14 In yet another irony, simply moving to cities does not magically create middle classes. Prosperity that alleviates poverty has not been an accident or a simple side effect of economic growth. All over the world, alleviating poverty has required specific and extensive interventions by social movements and government policies. As geographer Raju Das points out in the case of India, “The very fact that the [Indian] state could not rely on the [Green Revolution] for poverty-reduction and thus started a ‘direct attack’ on poverty through [other] policies is an indirect indicator of the limited impact of the GR” (2002, 70). Das continues that “if the lack of technology was a necessary cause of poverty, one in seven people in the United States of America would not have to live below the line of absolute poverty.” Indeed, the United States’ erstwhile thriving middle class emerged via a confluence of factors, notably Fordism and unionization. Fordism, named for pivotal car manufacturing magnate Henry Ford, follows from his “discovery” that paying his factory workers higher wages than he had to, and more than they needed to simply survive, allowed them to buy his products.15 Better paid factory workers became car owners. Alongside constant pressure from unions and other social movements in the United States, the conditions and compensation for labor improved throughout the twentieth century, with the hard-fought gains of the Progressive Era, rural and urban experiments and advances from the New Deal, and no small amount of prosperity coming out of the tragedy of World War II. In addition, government programs to help the country (and its former soldiers) readjust to peacetime supported improving the skill level of the workforce, corporate expansion, and conversion from wartime manufacturing (Fisk 2003; Moehrle 2003).16 The Keynesian correction extended to helping much of the rest of the world out of the war’s destruction, and the twentieth century witnessed the historic creation of the American middle class.17 Fordism, domestic protectionism, and strong unionization strengthened the articulations

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between workers and their wages, and their wages and consumption, unlike what is typically prescribed today for the Majority World (Chang 2012). As world systems theorists have pointed out, the policies much of the Majority World is encouraged to pursue lack the Fordist agreement with its own consumers, as they are advised to focus on goods produced for export. Further, those seeking to form and strengthen unions in the Majority World routinely face reprisal, repression, and worse. Such oppressive tactics are not infrequently condoned by, or at least less than vociferously opposed by, governments and corporations of the Minority World. For this reason, it is not surprising that there is growing evidence that lower food prices may not be good for poor societies, all things considered. In fact, several mainstream economists have found evidence in favor of the opposite. International Food Policy Research Institute economist Derek Headey (2014) writes that while standard microeconomic modeling approaches suggest that “in the short run, higher food prices increase poverty in developing countries,” macroeconomic models “that allow for an agricultural supply response and consequent wage adjustments suggest that the poor ultimately benefit from higher food prices. . . .We find robust evidence that in the long run (one to five years) higher food prices reduce poverty and inequality.”18 Meanwhile, as might be expected based on the importance of unionization and Fordism, farmer cooperatives are receiving increasing recognition from development organizations for their consistent and verifiable value in helping farmers to overcome poverty. Similarly, there is increasing evidence that higher rural wages change local dynamics such that urban wages also go up, as farming becomes more profitable and urban centers have to pay more to compete for labor that now has improved alternatives in agriculture (Headey and Martin 2016). It seems quite possible that this virtuous cycle could continue further, as urban residents with higher wages could drive healthier local food systems, with local and domestic food purchases becoming more accessible for better-paid urbanites, and other so-called multiplier effects. For the most part, neo-productivism ignores these details in favor of focusing on the very real need of improving farmer incomes. However, in avoiding the unreconstructed Malthusian bent of productivism, it still focuses on production as the key, or even only, means by which to decrease hunger. While a monomaniacal focus on productivity is widened to encompass income based on productivity, it ignores the dynamics we touched on above, the input treadmills that often occur when

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farmers seek to increase productivity and the price effects when farmers all together increase their production at the same time. And neoproductivism utterly ignores other methods for addressing rural poverty. The avenues of political rights to affordable food, redistribution, and government policies to boost wages or food access, and the possible positive effects of higher food prices on rural and urban poverty in the medium to long term, are typically left unaddressed. Thus the key flaw of neo-productivism is ultimately the same as the problems with productivism, FAD, and PUS. All customarily focus on production to the exclusion of other factors, despite evidence showing other factors are equally or more important. Quite simply, if one seeks to raise the incomes of poor farmers, there are two ways to do it. Farmers can be given better prices or they can produce more. While there are clearly many complicating factors in pursuing higher food prices in a helpful way in the real world, this is no less true of generating greater food security or greater income simply from increasing productivity.

second tendency: hunger, entitlements, and food security The three discourses in the first tendency are marked by a technocratic mindset. Hunger is an apolitical problem to be solved. FAD, PUS, and poverty need simply be handled by improving productivity, usually through technological improvements. That science and technology are not and cannot be apolitical, given that they are human ventures, remains underappreciated or unacknowledged (Jasanoff 2004). The first tendency does not directly account for what is well established in the scientific literature, namely, that hunger, famine, and malnutrition are most usually the result of power differentials and social, political, and economic factors rather than any simple deficit of food or technology. In contrast, approaches of the second tendency—which I propose is a composite of concepts around hunger, food security, and entitlements— share a certain intermediacy. Each can be placed within an apolitical framework that chooses to omit the relevant issues of power and control, or can take a reformist road that, for many commentators, is an unsatisfactorily partial confrontation with the unjust political systems producing deprivation in the first place. In yet other approaches within the second tendency, hunger and food security may be deployed as part of a radical critique rooted in a broader perspective of inequalities in power and the structures that sustain them.

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Thus the ongoing and persistent hunger suffered by between 800 million and 2 billion people can be viewed through a variety of lenses. Lappé and Collins (2015) point out that the conception of “hunger” typically presented to the broad public is simply one of “caloric deficiency.” Under that definition, the problem of hunger is more or less synonymous with the productivist tendency. What is more, caloric deficiency can be met by simply increasing the availability of more calories, regardless of the quality or appropriateness of said calories. Thus, hunger in this formulation could theoretically be addressed with a neverending supply of chili fries, cheeseburgers, and donuts. That would seem a snark too far, save for its suspicious resemblance to the agribusiness diet now being willfully spread from the Minority World to the Majority World. The calorie-based definition does not integrate the inherently negative cultural or biological effects of a diet of such little diversity, limited nutrients, and unhealthy hyperabundance of fats, simple carbohydrates, and protein. The visceral association of ongoing hunger with deep, unrelenting need can be useful in appealing to an easy sympathy on the part of most people, but can also lend strength to a problematic tendency to define hunger “down.” Anthropologist Jason Hickel (2016), for example, lambastes the estimates of hunger produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The FAO estimate of 794 million hungry in 2015 is based on the calories needed “for a sedentary lifestyle,” and counts as hungry only those who lack sufficient calories for such a lifestyle for over a year (FAO 2015a, 51). As Hickel puts it, The FAO’s definition ignores the fact that most poor people do not live sedentary lifestyles; rather, they are usually engaged in demanding physical labour, so in reality they need much more than the FAO’s minimum caloric threshold. . . . The FAO itself recognises this flaw. Its 2012 report admits that “many poor and hungry people are likely to have livelihoods involved in arduous manual labor.” It calls its core definition “narrow,” “very conservative,” focused on only “extreme caloric deprivation,” and thus “clearly insufficient” to inform policy. It acknowledges that most poor people actually require calories sufficient for “normal” or even “intense” activity. If we measure hunger at the more accurate (and still conservative) level of calories required for normal activity, we see that 1.5 billion people are hungry, according to an annex in the FAO’s 2012 report, which is twice as many as the UN would have us believe. (2016, 759)

Aspects of Hickel’s take on the FAO’s caveats around its core “Prevalence of Undernutrition” metric are perhaps slightly hyperbolic. Nonetheless,

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one may question the FAO’s wisdom in developing a “key” indicator of hunger that it itself admits is severely limited in its ability to paint the kind of comprehensive picture necessary for policy making. In this admission, the FAO puts itself in the uncomfortable position of acknowledging the existence of policy and, implicitly, politics. At the same time, it continues to foreground a politically convenient estimation of the world’s hungry; a narrative that fits a narrative of triumph far better than one on the difficult challenges facing us in addressing hunger. However, one could imagine an FAO analyst retorting that they explicitly state that their estimate is based on a “narrow definition of hunger” (FAO 2015a, 51). In addition, the FAO points out that “individuals experiencing difficulties in obtaining enough food are likely to switch towards cheaper sources of energy and to compromise the quality of their food intake in a way that can create substantial damage.” The UN organization also admits that its definition “cannot capture within-year fluctuations in the capacity to acquire enough energy from food, which may themselves be causes of significant stresses.” And they concede that it “cannot take into account any bias that may exist in intra-household distribution of foods, such as that arising from cultural habits or genderbased habits and beliefs.” And “a final and significant limitation of the FAO methodology for computing the prevalence of undernourishment is that it does not provide information on the degree of severity of the food insecurity conditions” (52). We learn on page 61 of a 68-page report that “the FAO suite of food security indicators has been presented since the 2013 edition of The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI). The suite comprises indicators that reflect a broader concept of food insecurity and hunger and allows consideration of their multifaceted nature” (emphasis added). Yet these caveats, in technical annexes to the full report, do little to moderate the consistently uncritical tone set by the first “Key Finding” outlined at the front of the report: “About 795 million people are undernourished globally, down 167 million over the last decade, and 216 million less than in 1990–92.” The limits of this arguably misleading presentation of indicators are acknowledged only in the middle of Annex 2 some fifty-eight pages later. In other words, the narrative and analysis of the report at large seem to be based mostly on this one “clearly insufficient” indicator.19 Lappé and Collins (2015) introduce important amplifications to the term hunger that look to encompass the larger sweep of the problem and its multiple indicators. “For us,” they write, “hunger means not only

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calorie deficiency but the much broader, and often more devastating, dimensions captured in ‘nutritional deprivation’ . . . it is a condition creating great and often lasting harms” (17). Hunger in this sense includes both calorie and nutrient deficiencies, such that those who may have access to enough calories may still be hungry if they are without access to enough appropriate nutrients. Such nutrient deficiencies can bequeath a lifetime of consequences when they result in stunting. The nutritional deprivation associated with stunting is also associated with reproductive problems for females, a weakened immune system, and cognitive impairment. In turn, stunting also corresponds to reduced educational and economic achievement. In short, stunting causes a lifetime of harm, meaning that “individuals designated as stunted during childhood should be counted throughout their lives among those suffering the consequences of nutritional deprivation” (Lappé and Collins 2015, 15). Taking this seriously means counting as hungry not just the quarter of children suffering from stunting, but rather the quarter of the total human population that has likely been directly affected by it, or approximately 1.8 billion people.20 The FAO’s estimates in SOFI are designed, the organization cautions us, to avoid overestimating the number of hungry in the world. One might consider its figures, then, just a natural counterpoint to Lappé and Collins’s number and the possibility that the latter is precisely such an overestimation. Either number could be subjected to technical critique over which is the best estimate of the number of hungry in the world. In reality, a focus on technical critiques demonstrates how an apolitical approach to any indicator obscures a deeper conversation of meaning and causality. While SOFI delves into considerably more sophisticated policy and economic analysis than the approaches of the first tendency discussed earlier, it does not adequately address how the current situation arose, or the ongoing inequalities in power that maintain hunger in the world. Much less does it seek to assign responsibility, which we should hold distinct from blame.21 As Ribot writes about the analysis of climate change vulnerability, but which applies to hunger as well: “The tracing of causality . . . is a threat to those who benefit, passively or actively, from unacceptable but everyday relations of production, exchange and consumption. It is no surprise indeed that analyses of climate focus on who is vulnerable rather than why. Why is socially and politically contentious. Yet contention should not stop us. It should be fodder for public debate—enabling democratic process around risk and response” (2014, 670).

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Engaging in just such a “tracing,” Lappé and Collins’s approach to hunger extends well beyond the technical or economic level, and rather is defined by deprivation of healthy food—and “the safe water needed to absorb its nutrients”—as a result of unequal power relationships that block access to food and sanitation. In this way, it is simultaneously a result of being “actively deprived,” and a condition “that we can all be part of ending” (16–17). Such an analysis is founded upon the very opposite premises of we bono reasoning. Thus “hunger,” depending on who is using the term and how it is used, can extend all the way from an apolitical term evoking the productivist tendency through to fully embracing the implications of the “structural violence” of the avoidable loss of capabilities and, in the aggregate, nearly countless years of human life as a result of uneven power structures (Johnston et al. 2002, 194). Hunger, as deployed in this view, must be associated with social and political inequalities. And it can be ended through concerted action, by focusing on recognizing, reconsidering, and redesigning the structures that generate and maintain these inequalities. In this light, we bono reasoning is itself a form of structural violence, and a broader view of hunger its opposition. The second approach within this tendency, Sen’s “entitlements approach” (EA) and its successors cover a similarly expansive conceptual space. And as with hunger, its ideas can be developed in such a way as to fall into the simplistic traps of the first tendency, or, in contrast, broadened to challenge the assumptions of the presently unjust system. At its most elementary, the EA serves as an alternative to and critique of FAD, proposing that, as we have seen, declines in food availability were neither necessary nor sufficient to create famines. Although developed with regards to famine, food entitlement decline (FED) also offers an alternate explanation for the proximate causes of ongoing malnutrition. Sen initially introduced four types of entitlements within the context of a “private ownership market economy” and restricted his analysis to entitlements that fell within the rule of law. The four categories he proposed are the trade-based entitlement to buy or barter goods from another willing party; the production-based entitlement to goods you produce or that are produced from resources you own; the labor-based entitlement to goods or money earned through your own labor; and the transfer-based entitlement to goods you are given or inherit. Sen’s ideas have been amply critiqued, updated, and modified in the decades since his influential book. Economist Stephen Devereux’s summary succinctly covers the major gaps in the FED framework:

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Sen’s approach is significantly weakened, both conceptually and empirically, by its methodological individualism and by its privileging of economic aspects of famine above sociopolitical determinants. A complementary analysis is required, one that recognizes the importance of non-market institutions in determining entitlements, famine as social process and epidemiological crisis, and violations of entitlement rules in the complex emergencies that typify most contemporary famines. (2001, 245)22

That is, Sen’s approach treats entitlements as a characteristic of individuals. Its power for explaining the challenges households and communities face with food access is thereby weakened. For instance, multiple communities may have competing claims for important resources, such as agricultural land, water rights, or even the genetic material of vital crops and animals. Devereux points out that simply aggregating individual decision making within the entitlement framework omits fundamentally sociopolitical processes dealing with power relationships that cannot be easily reconciled within such a legalistic and market-focused approach. In the same vein, a larger and persistent critique of FED—which Sen has since acknowledged—is that it is apolitical and ahistorical. It does not address the processes by which different entitlement claims have been defined or how they might be changed or placed under threat, nor does it incorporate historical explanations of causality. Starvation can happen in a system with functioning entitlements, where people are literally “entitled to starve.”23 In many cases, FED is insufficient for a proper understanding of how a community became food insecure, and is not up to elucidating the sociopolitical processes by which such a condition might be challenged and changed. Such limitations are even more acute when FED is applied toward thinking about ongoing hunger and endemic malnutrition. For example, both FED and FAD imply that the normal state of affairs can be characterized by sufficient access to and consumption of food in a society, given that each explicitly associates the onset of famine with a “decline” in food availability or food entitlements. Suffice it to say, that is rarely an accurate characterization of the normal state of affairs. Although this book is largely concerned with long-term and endemic malnutrition, I have reviewed the famine-focused FED and FAD frameworks as each has had immense influence on thinking beyond famines. FED may represent a significant improvement on productivist frameworks, but also shares some of their limits. Nevertheless, FED and FAD are foundational in the progression of thought around food and hunger. Clearly food availability affects the presence of endemic hunger. Clearly

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what entitlements people possess and how, or whether, such possession is recognized by their sociopolitical systems affects access to food. The issue here is that both propositions are insufficient. Food security, the last framework in what we are classifying as the second tendency, brings together these foundational elements of FAD and FED. Even this juxtaposition, however, recapitulates the problems of other apolitical approaches. That said, the notion of food security can offer an entrée into more critical approaches to malnutrition and hunger that begin to address issues of power and politics. The concept of food security originated after World War I. The term’s usage undertook a significant uptick in the 1970s, with an explosion in use and definitions since. After the World Food Summit of 1996, a core definition emerged that has been heavily influential, and was only slightly modified since, so as to create a “working definition” by 2003: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Household food security is the application of this concept to the family level, with individuals within households as the focus of concern” (FAO 2003, 29). The definition partially addresses some of the critiques leveled at approaches rooted in FED, with its attention to individuals within households, its attention to cultural preferences and tastes, and an at least partial incorporation of a temporal dimension. Though it may be noted that the inclusion of the phrase “at all times,” evokes the importance of stability in food security, it neither addresses problems of ahistoricity nor suggests a path to tracing contextual causes—the “why” that should be asked in all cases of food insecurity. This “why” is vitally important. Indian scholar Amrita Rangasami points out that “the famine process cannot be defined with reference to the victims of starvation alone. It is a process in which benefits accrue to one section of the community while losses flow to the other. To define it only with reference to the victims, to my mind obscures the study of the process” (1985a, 1748). This pattern of benefits and losses likely goes a long way in accounting for not just the occurrence of a famine— or endemic malnutrition—but for its recurrence or persistence, and why it tends to recur or persist in certain places or communities (Rangasami 1985b, 1797). For instance, private corporations and governments may benefit from famines and endemic malnutrition at least in terms of circumventing spending resources to address them. Making sure the poor and food insecure have access to food is not free, and because food

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security is a public good, private industry is largely let off the hook.24 Addressing famine requires redistributive government policies of the kind that are currently unfashionable for many governments under neoliberal globalization. Neither the “public goods” nature of food security nor the challenges of redistributive policies are directly encapsulated by the definition of food security the FAO presents. However, to the significant extent that international concerns of food security have come to be associated with international norms around the human right to food, (re)distribution and provision of public goods towards food security can be seen as incumbent on national governments. The human rights basis for food security is implicit in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and was expanded and affirmed under the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). While the UDHR was a foundation for the formation of the United Nations, it was also nonbinding. But paired together, the ICESCR and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which are binding agreements under international law, are considered the “International Bill of Rights” (Brown 2016). Scholars and activists customarily interpret the right to food envisioned in these agreements as a normative obligation for national governments to address and enhance food security. Ellen Messer and Marc Cohen (2007, 18) note that what this means for food policy below the national level is not well developed, particularly with regards to the specific obligations governments might have to generate and maintain food security. Food security as interpreted by international institutions is now also lined up along “four pillars”: 1. Availability: sufficient food supply of appropriate quality; 2. Access: adequate resources (including infrastructure and economic resources) to actually acquire appropriate and nutritious foods— i.e., the presence and functioning of appropriate entitlements; 3. Utilization: the ability to actually consume and benefit from an adequate diet, which is strongly affected by overall health status, clean water, appropriate sanitation, and health care (i.e., “nonfood inputs in food security”); and 4. Stability: consistency in access to adequate, nutritious food and nonfood resources—in other words, the avoidance of or resilience to natural, financial, or social shocks as well as stability in food security throughout seasonal or gradual changes.25

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One can see in the four pillars, and in the more complex suite of indicators now used by the FAO, an elementary and indirect nod to the importance of local and national context, distribution, public resources and public goods, and, if one squints, history and political rights (FAO 2015a, particularly Figure A2.1, 48). But as critics of the food security framework have repeatedly pointed out, an indirect grasp of power relationships, history, and rights is vastly insufficient to the task of ending hunger. In the words of food system scholar and activist Raj Patel: Critically, the definition of food security [avoids] discussing the social control of the food system. As far as the terms of food security go, it is entirely possible for people to be food secure in prison or under a dictatorship. From a state perspective, the absence of specification about how food security should come about was diplomatic good sense. . . . the power politics of the food system needed very explicitly to feature in the discussion. (2009, 665)26

The last way we will look at food security here is through the lens of the Five A’s of Food Security framework, developed by Cecilia Rocha and the Centre for Studies in Food Security at Ryerson University, which Rocha directed from 2005 to 2010. The Five A’s represent a logical bridge between the second and third tendencies, as they take a significant step towards addressing the power politics Patel poses as essential. This step is arguably insufficient and, to be certain, it remains underdeveloped. The Five A’s break food security into five codependent pillars: availability, accessibility, adequacy, acceptability, and agency. The first two pillars are essentially the same as their counterparts in the “classical” definition of food security above. Availability is defined in terms of sufficient production and supply. Accessibility refers to the physical, social, economic, and cultural means to actually procure suitable food. In this conception of food security, stability of access is a vital subelement of accessibility. The other three A’s are defined as: Adequacy: food that is nutritious, suitably diverse, safe to eat, and produced using environmentally sound (sustainable and healthy) practices. Acceptability: the requirement that the available, accessible, and adequate food also be culturally acceptable. In other words, that it is produced and obtained in ways that do not compromise the dignity, self-respect, or basic human rights of eater or producer, and allows food choices in line with moral, religious, ethical, and cultural values. Agency: the requirement that citizens are empowered in defining and securing their own food security, and thus that there are competent sociopolitical systems wherein policies and practices may be brought forth by the will of

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the citizens and reflected in governance to enable the achievement of overall food security. This includes access to accurate information, the right to such information and to other aspects of food security, and the ability to secure such rights.27

The key addition of agency takes the Five A’s of Food Security beyond the limited definitions of the other approaches we have introduced so far and, while it does not exactly include notions of history, inequality, or structural violence, it is an invocation of the importance of real democratic access for all populations in order to fulfill food security. While not speaking to power inequalities, or what to do about them, agency as presented here at least indirectly acknowledges the need for those to be addressed. It makes food security, in this sense, incompatible with the provision of availability, access, adequacy, and acceptability under imprisonment or dictatorship. It adds responsive (and arguably representative) governance to the basket of “entitlements” necessary, and can be seen to offer a means by which to encompass the ravaging effects of war and the use of food as a weapon—important drivers of food insecurity. The definition ties to what colleagues and I have previously called “a capacious view of agency—many political rights and processes, not necessarily directly connected to food, can affect food security and the realization of the right to food . . . there is the implicit relationship of agency . . . with rights to an adequate standard of living, social security for non-workers, childhood nutrition, minimum wage, support for agriculture, especially for the landless, small and poor farmers, and rights to health, and gender equality” (Chappell, Sears, and Moore 2011, 8). In other words, we might think of agency as being composed of the following two elements defined by Ribot: “Substantive citizenship is . . . the ability to influence those who govern. Substantive democracy is when that influence results in response” (2014, 695–96, emphasis added). And while agency remains conspicuously absent in the vast majority of food security discourse—Rocha (2007) does not explicitly name agency— Rocha describes her work here “to be in fact a justification of the importance of agency . . . we cannot achieve the first 4 A’s of food security without agency.”28

third tendency: food justice and food sovereignty If we are finally to take the substantial evidence and history seriously and view hunger as primarily due to inequalities in power and resources, then

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we need to analyze it with frameworks capable of taking these issues as central foci. Unlike the first two tendencies, the third tendency takes power, justice, and distribution as key questions to be dealt with from the very start. Food justice, for one, seeks to address the legacy of structural discrimination along race and class lines, and “engages with the needs and struggles of people for whom agrifood systems are just one more realm of marginalization, discrimination, and oppression, rather than the primary site of inequality” (Chappell and Schneider 2016). Food justice arguably takes the intermediacy of the second tendency as a starting point, given the concerns of some analysts that it is more inclined to work within current “embedded power relationships” rather than directly tackle the challenge of radically restructuring them (Clendenning, Dressler, and Richards 2016, 171, inter alia). However, within some interpretations—and even within some organizations—the “progressive” approach of food justice blends into or coexists with the “radical” approach of food sovereignty, locating the center of gravity more around redistribution and restructuring relationships (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011). Food justice is most closely identified with urban food movements in the Minority World, particularly in the United States. It emerges from an identifiable pedigree of “progressive” politics, having developed alongside the frameworks and activities related to environmental justice and civil and labor rights and organizing (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011, see especially 124). It focuses on empowerment, especially, but not exclusively, through exercising economic and buying power, community organizing, and placing demands on the state and society through localized governance and consumption. To the extent that growing local economic and social power is prioritized over addressing the overall inequalities produced and reproduced by current neoliberal structures, food justice might be said to focus on “short-term actions and rights in domestic contexts” (Clendenning, Dressler, and Richards 2016, 175). Empowerment focusing on exerting economic (or buying) power and increasing local control can make important contributions, but leave in place or re-create the barriers of class and race that are the ultimate source of food injustice. Further, they can result in patchworks of local projects that exist in the fringes of the larger, deeply flawed food system and thus remain unaware of or unable to mount the kind of coordinated and systematic challenge necessary to change larger structures (HoltGiménez and Shattuck 2011; Holt-Giménez and Wang 2011). At the risk of caricaturizing the extremely heterogeneous food justice landscape, a synopsis may help here. The center of gravity of food

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justice could be said to be deeply aware of the structural discrimination and violence that cause hunger, but also unwilling to take the leap to redistribution over hopes of “win-win” (or “win-settle”) solutions.29 The bromide that a “rising tide lifts all boats” assumes more resources generated by a robust economy can be shared by everybody, a “winwin” alternative to redistributing current resources.30 As minority and poor communities gain socioeconomic power along with everyone else, the theory goes, they can gain equality. But as Rangasami said with regards to famines, there are winners and losers in the current food system. Providing universal food security would likely create new sets of winners and losers. If we took, for example, the simple step of addressing and reducing the rampant corporate concentration in the food system, wherein a small number of companies controls vast swaths of market share in food retail, agriculture inputs, and agriculture processing, it would decrease the power these industries exercise in setting prices and contract terms, and in principle benefit farmers and agricultural laborers but hurt the industry’s record profits. If the U.S. minimum wage movement, the Fight for $15, and other struggles over wages succeed, then the increased buying power of better-paid workers may improve their food security—at the potential cost of profits.31 The “rising tide” riposte would submit that the better approach would be based on more food sold and profits gained. Then higher wages and cost savings would trickle down—sooner or later—to workers and consumers, respectively. But even in the case that this worked as advertised—which it essentially never has—the resources to produce and sell more food are not without cost, to the environment and society more broadly (as we touched on earlier in our discussion of the effects of disproportionate increases in the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers compared to increases in yield). In other words, the possibility that a redistribution from today’s “winners” to current “losers” in food security may be socially just, as well as necessary and efficient, rarely enters into consideration.32 Redistribution offers the potential for what I would call “win-win-lose” scenarios, where general social well-being is improved, say, via just and sufficient access for more people to appropriate food and other resources; environmental quality improves, for instance, by reducing the use of synthetic inputs; but profits decline—less food is sold because current consumption is in significant excess of what by all accounts is considered healthy. This is not to say that many food justice advocates do not share similar analyses; many of them do. The food justice movement is highly heterogeneous, with few uniting documents laying out overall strategy

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and analysis. It is decentralized and often focused on local efforts. Many food justice activists are “engaged in the hard, grassroots work of building new food systems” and “simply do not have the time, resources, or inkling to actively oppose the global food industry” (Holt-Giménez and Wang 2011, 88–89). Food justice in the United States partly draws its provenance from the radical work and ideals of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and contemporary actors often coexist with, voice support for, and share analyses with many elements of these kinds of more radical, structurally focused and redistributional activists and analysis. Finally, with food sovereignty, we reach what is both the newest member of the analytical tendencies in food systems and the one that was most singularly developed to address the oversights of its siblings. Food sovereignty was developed specifically to address the perceived apolitical nature and inadequate challenge to current structural inequalities represented by food security. Whereas the other tendencies, even food justice to an extent, can be spun as being mute on citizens and citizenship, food sovereignty is precisely concerned with the issues of substantive citizenship and democracy that Ribot raised. Food sovereignty demands that the state be responsive to the demands of its citizens. It demands a rethinking of the nature of the state in terms of how decisions are made and communities are involved. Recalling Ribot’s statements quoted above, that “contention should not stop us” but rather “it should be fodder for public debate—enabling democratic process,” we can apply the same admonitions in the discourse around food sovereignty. Rural sociologist and food sovereignty scholar Hannah Wittman (2010, 96) summarizes it as “the rights of local peoples to determine their own agricultural and food policy, organize production and consumption to meet local needs, and secure access to land, water, and seed.” In its focus on local peoples and selfdetermination, food sovereignty ties itself to several other important international claims, including localization movements; democracy broadly and “deep” or “participatory” democracy in particular; and the rhetoric of fundamental human rights, such as the ICESCR (Chappell 2013; Carlson and Chappell 2015). Indeed, the main text of the ICESCR begins, “All peoples have the right of self-determination. . . . The States Parties to the present Covenant . . . shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right.” The origins of the concept of food sovereignty are often traced back to the 1990s as it was promoted by the international small farmers’ movement La Vía Campesina (LVC, The Peasant’s Way).33 However,

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as Marc Edelman showed in 2014 (964), the idea goes back further, at least to the Mexican government in the 1980s, which defined it as increasing national self-determination and sufficiency in food production, technology, commercialization, and consumption. Edelman points out that food sovereignty and food security have not always been as analytically distinct as LVC and its allies have often portrayed. Nevertheless, there is also a basis for the contrast current advocates of food sovereignty draw with the state of discourse in food security, which as we have seen is often depoliticized, ahistorical, and at best agnostic regarding power inequalities. This distinction is a significant part of food sovereignty’s development. The approach has often been clearest in defining itself by what it is against or different from, including apolitical food security, but also in its roots in anti-imperialism, antiglobalization, and anticorporate struggles. But as deployed by LVC, it has also been positively defined along at least three rights-based axes: “the right to self-determination of a peasant lifestyle and identity; the right of peasants to have rights; and the fundamental importance of gender equality” (Chappell 2013, 722). This is not to say that there have not been more detailed and exhaustive proposals for the meaning of food sovereignty. Patel (2009, 663) famously remarked that “food sovereignty is, if anything, over defined.” Social movements and their allies have worked intently on refining and building a shared definition, and five “interlinked and inseparable components” of food sovereignty arising from this work can be identified (Akram-Lodhi 2015; Forum for Food Sovereignty 2009). Paraphrasing Akram-Lodhi’s reiteration, these components are: 1. A focus on food for people, with rights to sufficient, healthy, and culturally appropriate food “for all individuals, peoples and communities at the centre of food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries policies” (564). Juxtaposed with such rights is a rejection of treating food as just another commodity, reflecting the admonition that “commodities will be produced . . . only for those who can afford them, and priority will be given to the production of those commodities with the highest profit margins”;34 2. Valuing food providers, with a focus on securing rights and respect for those who grow, harvest, and process food, in particular those working in small-scale, family, traditional, and indigenous food systems. Such rights are placed alongside a rejection of policies and approaches that threaten their livelihoods;

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3. The localization of food systems that insists that food providers and consumers are placed at the center of systemic decision making; rejects international trade deals and regimes that favor large corporations and foster inequality; rejects privatization and appropriation of common heritage, natural resources, and goods; places the control of “territory, land, grazing, water, seeds, livestock and fish populations in the hands of local food providers” and respects “their rights to use and share them in socially and environmentally sustainable ways” (565); 4. A broad-based building of skills that supports the skills and indigenous knowledge in local communities, in part through the management, conservation, and development of local food production, harvesting, and distribution systems, and appropriate research supporting these elements; and 5. Working with nature by respecting and supporting the integrity and contributions of ecosystems and communities’ ecological knowledge, particularly the use of diversified, low-external-input agricultural methods.35 Such a normative vision of food sovereignty implies dramatic breaks with “business-as-usual,” as well as a difficult rebalancing of established priorities and power relations. Its association with a “radical” political current in the classification of Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011) is hardly surprising. Suddenly a radical vision offers the most “realistic” view of what is needed to end hunger, given the insufficiencies of the other approaches we have examined in this chapter. At the same time, it is a concept that is still under development and the object of active critiques (e.g., Edelman 2014; Iles and Montenegro de Wit 2015). Further, although its application is by no means necessarily restricted to an agrarian context, it has primarily been developed and promoted by farmer and rural interests—most notably, LVC, which is a movement founded by and overwhelmingly composed of small-scale farmers and fisherfolk, not consumers, food processors, or food service workers. Although theoretically applicable in, say, the urban context, the use and understanding of the term by urban antihunger and food justice advocates has been limited to date (Clendenning, Dressler, and Richards 2016). The ongoing development of food sovereignty is a topic more than ample enough for its own book.36 But I would draw attention to two points as we conclude our discussion of it here. The first is that,

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recognizing the different emphases and origins of food justice and food sovereignty, my colleague Mindi Schneider and I recently proposed to combine the two as two legs of a new “three-legged stool of food system sustainability,” with agroecology the third leg (Chappell and Schneider 2016). Agroecology, the science, practice, and movement of a sustainable and just agricultural system, adds the scientific method as well as respect for traditional and local knowledge to the aspirations and ideals of food justice and food sovereignty. We propose that rather than trying to expand any of the three concepts to embrace all of the principles of the others, they be viewed as three deeply interconnected and mutually constituting pillars. We will return to these pillars as we examine the food systems of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and the United States in later chapters. The second point, to which we will also return, is the potential power of pairing food sovereignty with food security, particularly the food security framework of Rocha’s Five A’s. Insofar as the Five A’s, particularly the last A of agency, may also fit into Holt-Giménez and Shattuck’s classification of “progressive” efforts at changing the food system, and food sovereignty definitively fits into their “radical” classification, pairing them may be the most effective way forward in their view: “In order to influence the political nature of reform, the food movement will not only need to apply concerted social pressure, it will need to advance clear political proposals. This implies building social convergence within the movement’s diversity. The political effectiveness of this ‘convergence in diversity’ will depend on the nature and strength of the strategic alliances constructed between Progressive and Radical trends of the food movement” (2011, 136). As we will see, based on the history of food security policy and politics in Brazil, and in the views of both scholars of Brazilian food policy and former government officials involved in their successful programs, it is exactly this kind of progressive-radical conjuncture that helped spur the innovations in Belo Horizonte—the original test site for many policies that have now borne fruit scaled up at the national level. This chapter has sought to provide an overview of the current state of policy conversations around international and national food security. It has aimed to provide a grounding in the context and evolution of scholarly opinion around hunger and food insecurity. Underlying the entire discussion has been a focus on the increasing recognition of the central role of social rights and political agency in addressing these problems, taking us from productivism’s intuitive and common understanding of

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current and historical hunger to newer frameworks for understanding hunger and malnutrition, and the rising radical perspectives of food justice and food sovereignty. The rest of the book will draw heavily on the Five A’s framework, as its potential to incorporate a holistic approach to the economic, environmental, and sociopolitical challenges and effects of food security is compelling. The importance of radical and progressive currents in Brazil’s food system innovations, and the direct parallels the Five A’s have with the enunciated aims of the originators of the first full flowering of these ideas in the city of Belo Horizonte (BH), makes the framework a logical and intuitive tool for understanding BH’s successes. In the rest of the book, I will describe what allowed this city of over two million people to buck so many trends and make a dramatic and sustained improvement in food security. I will address how and why BH’s programs came about. I will review the successes, limits, and failures of the programs; what allows them to continue; and how can we learn from them to create new successes and improve existing efforts elsewhere. In short, in analyzing BH, I will also detail how a better alternative food system might look, and how we might get there, initiating, we should hope, a new phase in what appears as a marker of our common humanity—our long-standing conversation about food.

chapter 3

Belo Horizonte All Five A’s on the Horizon

Since founding its food secretariat in 1993, the government of Brazil’s sixth largest city, Belo Horizonte (BH), has presided over unprecedented improvements in local food security. Its programs have supported various improvements in health and diet throughout the city, including a 60% decrease in child hospitalization due to malnutrition, and a similar sized decrease in mortality rates for children under five years old.1 Infant mortality, for babies under a year old, has fallen by more than 70%. There has been a 33% decrease in hospitalization due to diabetes (figure 3).2 Taquaril, one of BH’s poorest areas, saw infant mortality decrease rapidly early on, from 66.8 to 26.3 per 1,000 live births between 1993 and 1997, from double the citywide average to near-parity in 1997 (Aranha 2000, 105–6). Further, BH saw a 25% increase in per capita household consumption of fruits and vegetables between 1987 and 1997, taking it from the city sixth in consumption of green vegetables in Brazil to first, and from eighth to second in consumption of fruits (IBGE 1991, 1997). Only one other major Brazilian city saw both fruit and vegetable consumption increase in the same period.3 And an estimated 800,000 citizens interact each year with BH’s programs—almost 40% of the population in 2003 (Aranha 2003). In short, BH’s programs have redefined national and international standards for institutions governing the right to food. The city department responsible for these programs, technically called the Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security (or SMASAN), has received numerous accolades.4 It has been the object 66

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figure 3. Infant mortality rate, in deaths of infants under one year old per 1,000 births; Child mortality rate, in deaths of children under five per 1,000 live births; Hospitalizations of children under one year old for malnutrition, per 1,000 children (right-hand axis); Hospitalizations (any age) for diabetes, per 100,000 residents (right-hand axis); and the national infant mortality rate. Data for Belo Horizonte based on PMBH (2016). National data from World Bank (2016).

of analyses by some of the most prominent thinkers on food security, and by international organizations such as the United Nations and the Ford Foundation.5 SMASAN has served as a test bed for many of the ideas later used by Brazil’s national food security program, Fome Zero (FZ, Zero Hunger), founded in 2002 by then incoming president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, a founding member of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT). The mayor who founded BH’s programs, PT member Patrus Ananias de Souza, continued on to lead FZ for six years. FZ appears to have led to dramatic reductions in poverty and poverty severity in Brazil;

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provided vital support to small family farmers in the form of basic socioeconomic security, boosting their ability to pursue food sovereignty; and decreased Brazil’s high level of socioeconomic inequality (Aranha et al. 2010; Rocha 2009; Wittman and Blesh 2015). The immense, though far from complete, success of FZ’s acclaimed programs validate the notion that the lessons of BH could be scaled up. But how was BH able to achieve its successes? Are there principles that can be learned from their efforts and applied elsewhere? Cecilia Rocha of Canada’s Ryerson University, the foremost scholar on and communicator of the lessons of BH’s programs, has been careful in differentiating BH’s roles as an inspiration and as a model: “It cannot be a model because it has to be contextualized. But I think that the important message here is that it is possible. And it is feasible. There are alternatives [to the current dominant food security institutions]” (Rocha interview in Luttik 2014, 26). This chapter seeks to fill out that contextualization, drawing on a case study with the aim of generating rich, nuanced, practical, and generalizable inferences (Flyvbjerg 2006). Such multifaceted pictures can help us to understand what approaches and processes may be usable in other contexts as starting points for locally tailored policies. Here, we will examine the content and approach of SMASAN’s programs, with chapter 4 subsequently offering a closer analysis of how BH came to enact and implement their approach. In terms of content and approach, SMASAN’s history shows close parallels with the Five A’s framework (box 1). The comprehensiveness of this approach has been a key element of SMASAN’s success. This itself constitutes a good reason to focus on the Five A’s framework in our analysis. But an additional reason to focus on the Five A’s is precisely their characteristic as an intermediary between the first and third analytical tendencies discussed in chapter 2. Breaking from the studied Malthusianist myopia of the first tendency, the Five A’s allow for the analysis of culture, power relations, inequality, and political economy that we know is vital to understanding hunger. At the other end, there is significant promise in both food sovereignty and food justice as analytical frameworks, but their relative newness and historical focus primarily on either producers or Minority World urban consumers, respectively, raise additional challenges in synthesizing their perspectives with the extensive scholarship that has preceded them. Their novelty is completely to the good to the extent that they are making up for blind spots in the latter scholarship. But synthesizing earlier work and

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Box 1: The Five A’s of Food Security 1. Availability: sufficient food supply of appropriate quality 2. Accessibility: social, economic, and physical access for all people and at all times to appropriate and nutritious foods 3. Adequacy: the available and accessible food is nutritious, suitably diverse, safe to eat, and produced using environmentally sustainable practices 4. Acceptability: food is also produced and obtained in ways that do not compromise the dignity, self-respect, or basic human rights of eater or producer, and allows food choices in line with moral, religious, ethical, and cultural values 5. Agency: citizens are empowered in defining and securing their rights, in particular with respect to food security; and there are competent, responsive sociopolitical systems to enact and ensure these rights. Source: Adapted from Centre for Studies in Food Security. 2016. Our Approach. Toronto: Ryerson University. Retrieved from http://www.ryerson.ca/foodsecurity/our-approach .html.

the critiques offered by food sovereignty and food justice arguably ends up at something very much like the Five A’s approach. Thus we will be using the Five A’s framework to guide us in understanding the principles that have been at the center of SMASAN since its creation, its successes, and its limits and possible missteps. Having emphasized the importance of context, we should begin by putting the innovations, successes, and challenges of SMASAN and BH in their proper place and time. The most obvious element is the larger context of Brazil. Brazil is a country large and productive enough to feed its own population, and wealthy enough to buy enough food from elsewhere to make up any deficits that arise. But perhaps more importantly, Brazil’s wealth is very far from evenly distributed; its sheer economic size is no necessary buffer against hunger for its approximately twenty million poor people.6 In fact, Brazil has the world’s thirteenth highest level of income inequality (UNDP 2015). Its inequality in land ownership, an enduring manifestation of sociopolitical power in Brazil, is even more profound yet, and has been virtually unchanged for decades.7 And when socioeconomic inequality is taken into account, Brazil’s Human Development Index (an indicator combining multiple measures of human well-being) drops twenty places (from seventy-fifth to ninety-fifth out of 189 countries).

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Further, at the time of this writing in 2016, Brazil is suffering from a multiyear recession, with dramatic increases in unemployment reported. From everything we’ve learned, these inequalities in power, the barriers they represent to realizing basic human rights, and the poverty they embody are the most significant causes of hunger. So it is likely that the number of poor in Brazil has increased significantly, and that food security has suffered as a result, after years of dramatic improvements (Rocha 2016b). Given such pressures, it may be surprising that Brazil has been at the forefront of fighting hunger and poverty. Historian Angus Wright has observed, “The various redistributive programs of the Lula and Rousseff administrations ranging from Fome Zero to Bolsa Família to changes in the minimum wage under nearly full employment have led to one of the great historic reductions in poverty anywhere.”8 At the same time, Brazil’s history of dramatic inequality and enduring class divides is foundational to understanding its history of food security and insecurity. That is to say nothing of the country’s legacy as the destination for between 40% and 50% of the total of 12.5 million African people forcibly brought to the Americas as slaves (Skidmore 1999; Kahn and Bouie 2015). And with Brazil’s recent instability and social unrest, some may question if we really ought to be looking to learn from its example. But if skepticism is healthy, cynicism is less so: judging that one has gone the wrong direction because one did not immediately arrive at one’s destination is folly. Wrong turns, cul-de-sacs, misfortunes, and incomplete successes are some of the inevitabilities of the real world. The internationally recognized successes of Brazil in reducing hunger are invaluable lessons: even if they by themselves do not tell us how to finally win the struggle against hunger, they give us insight into how to make our efforts more effective. Understanding how they have made the progress they have is part of understanding how to improve on it, and to give us the raw material to contextualize and improve other efforts. And to understand the story of BH, and Brazil’s significant if incomplete successes thus far, we need to understand how food policy and human rights developed historically in Brazil.

a brief history of the evolution of food policy in brazil As we reviewed in chapter 2, the broader conceptualizations of hunger as structural violence and the wages of inequality and poverty have

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offered much more comprehensive approaches to understanding the true dynamics of hunger than previous analyses. But all of these analytical refinements can lack something of the visceral connection evoked by the simple and instinctual notion of hunger. There is a cruel irony here. Even as the conception of hunger as a lack of sufficient food is more intuitive, it is also the case that this understanding of hunger has a certain, almost nefarious political usefulness. While Malthusian views have given way within much of the expert community, it is no coincidence that intuitive, plausible, and wrong understandings of hunger have also persisted. These misconceptions have allowed the direct and indirect beneficiaries of current systems to either feign or genuinely enjoy blissful ignorance among a changing conceptual landscape. (Recall previous chapters’ discussion of cui bono and we bono.) It is in a similar vein that Brazil has experienced its own oft-contradictory and variably effective efforts at addressing hunger. Even as Brazil’s leaders began to give serious attention to hunger after World War I, they clung to the dominant Malthusian views of the time, focusing on economic growth and agricultural production (Aranha 2000). The idea that Brazil’s profound levels of inequality and poverty were the ultimate sources of the hunger and food insecurity entered mainstream thought only some decades later. Meanwhile, in the immediate postwar period, the country’s leaders continued to support export-led economic expansion in Brazil at the expense of internal food markets (Skidmore 1999; Aranha 2000). Economic inequality in this period meant that even when there was sufficient food supply in the country, market prices reflected the effective demand of the limited population who could afford commodity foodstuffs, rather than the true demand that included all of those who needed food, but could not afford it (Khan 1985; de Carvalho Filho 1995; Aranha 2000). Subsequent increases in the general income of Brazil’s populace increased effective demand for those already benefiting from secure work. But this also increased market prices such that the poor, again, could not afford food supposedly available to them (de Carvalho Filho 1995; Nabuco 2007). Unsurprisingly, the failure of Brazil’s leaders to profoundly address socioeconomic inequality led to a dearth of social entitlements, including food security. This extended beyond food and income to urban infrastructure—water, light, sanitation, health, and education—exacerbating the country’s food security problems (Aranha 2000, 15). True reform was made difficult by a number of factors, including the country’s deeply entrenched classism and racism; the vast distances separating its

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population; and the tumultuous, frequent shifts in elite power among Brazil’s technocrats, descendants of nobility, military leaders, political populists, industrialists, and dictators. In fact, Brazil’s social institutions of subservience and automatic deference to social hierarchy allowed its powerful elites to enjoy a great degree of impunity despite deep sociopolitical inequalities. Elites were “by and large successful in convincing non-elites there was no way to change their world” (Skidmore 1999, 39). Brazil’s elites saw themselves as building a powerful and modern country. To that extent, there did seem to be a genuine view that certain advances in the public good were appropriate goals of a modern state (Skidmore 1999; Williamson 2003). A proper modern state, it seemed, was industrialized, but also looked after worker and public welfare. Though to be certain, concerns over welfare were also part of strategies to quell worker unrest and provide industries with capable and healthy workers. It was in this context that Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro’s work earned its influence. His 1932 study of the working class in the city of Recife established “for the first time . . . direct links between workers’ productivity and their diet,” by putting workers in the context of their “conditions of life, type of housing, their salaries” (A. M. de Castro 2010, 19). Eight years later, this helped influence dictator (and later popularly elected president) Getúlio Vargas to build stronger central government institutions to “improve social welfare for urban workers” (Skidmore 1999, 115). Based on rising technocratic mindsets (a combination of political pragmatism, clientilism, and modernist belief in science-led progress), Vargas “increased investment in education, [and] economic development (to support industrialization).” Historian Thomas Skidmore describes these elements of Vargas’s dictatorship as an idiosyncratic combination that borrowed from both European fascism and the American New Deal, as Vargas sought to consolidate support among both industry and (government-controlled) labor unions through his policies. Along with spurring further research in food security and nutrition, Vargas’s new political economy fostered the creation of a Social Security Food Service (SAPS) office in 1940. The law establishing SAPS stated that it was necessary to “improve the diet of the nation’s workers and, consequently, their health and vigor and work capacity, via progressive, rational improvement of their dietary habits” (Decreto-Lei #2.478, August 5, 1940). SAPS implemented a number of programs that are now used by contemporary food security institutions as well. These include popular restaurants, where fresh-cooked, low-price meals could be bought by

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urban workers; meals for workers’ children, a forerunner of School Meal programs; minimum wages to increase the effective demand and food security of industrial laborers; nutrition training courses; and facilities selling basic necessities at cost (Peliano 2010). However, such programs were based more on capitalist and industrialist logics than humanist recognition of universal human rights. Rural workers, for example, were largely excluded, subjected to neglect and violent repression by powerful rural landowners (Skidmore 1999, 115–17). It is interesting to note as well the parallel currents of technocratic rationalism, right-wing populism, and racist conceptualizations of “civilizing” workers in Peru, which likely lent inspiration to some of Vargas’s policies. This is particularly true of Peru’s innovations in state-run restaurants (although as historian Paulo Drinot noted in 2005, staterun restaurants were part of a number of early twentieth-century political projects).9 In fact, in 1936 the Peruvian government produced a book on their Popular Restaurant programs “as a blueprint that other governments in Latin American could copy” (Drinot 2005, 263).10 So it seems highly likely that Vargas’s technocrats were influenced by their western neighbor’s efforts to foster “rational improvements” in dietary habits. However, Drinot’s analysis also uncovers the racist cant of Peru’s popular restaurants. They were meant to help foster modern, scientific diets in the working class, in contradistinction to the eateries and food stands operated by Japanese and Chinese immigrants, which Peruvian technocrats stereotyped as “disease-ridden and innutritious” (Drinot 2005, 247). Although I am not aware of any Brazilian ties to the racist components of Peru’s “civilizing” Popular Restaurant programs, there can be little doubt that similar attitudes were present in Brazil, where early twentieth-century intellectuals “extolled the ‘aryan’ as Brazil’s most creative actor” (Skidmore 1999, 104). Vargas’s contemporaneous projects in Brazil, in Skidmore’s analysis, sought to “‘protect’ the country from those defined as ‘un-Brazilian,’ such as those of Japanese or Jewish descent,” with closures imposed upon “newspapers, schools, and organizations deemed ‘foreign’” (1999, 119). But in keeping with Brazil’s paradoxical—or more properly, dialectical—regressions and advancements in food security, the development of its early programs was also influenced by a far more liberatory analysis. Building from his influential 1932 analysis, Josué de Castro’s Geography of Hunger (1946/1984) explicitly declared that racial superiorities and inferiorities do not exist (89, tenth edition). Rather, adequate

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and appropriate nutrition mattered more than race. He decried exploitation of the Majority World by the imperial powers of the Minority World, as well as exploitation by elites within the Majority World who sought to maintain “get-rich-quick” economies with an “industry of hunger” for the majority of people (283). Castro called for increasing workers’ income, remedying inattention to the rural sector, supporting small family farmers, and improving care of natural resources and ecosystems. His reproach of the pernicious and hunger-producing inequalities in Brazil had an indelible influence on all subsequent efforts in Brazilian food security policy. But despite the early hue and cry from figures like Castro and the implementation of a few relevant social programs, Brazil’s early policies did not fundamentally challenge the inequalities and hierarchies that were the actual determinants of hunger. Once the Vargas government was forced from power in 1945, SAPS was progressively disassembled. What remained of the government’s focus on food policy moved towards emergency aid and education in “proper dietary habits,” on the assumption that the hungry did not know how to “eat right” (Peliano 2010). Brazil also implemented few redistributive policies compared to other countries undergoing similarly rapid industrial transitions in the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, inequality grew (Bonelli and Ramos 1995). The country arrived at a situation today in which “only 36% of the world’s countries have a greater per capita income than Brazil, but its degree of poverty is significantly above the average” for countries with comparable levels of wealth per capita (A. M. de Castro 2010, 23). The political ground continued to rapidly shift in Brazil over the course of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The military dictatorship that came to power in 1964 issued a series of reforms over the course of its twentyone-year rule, even as it engaged in systematic repression of political activities and decidedly failed to follow through on other issues, such as land reform. Many of Brazil’s intellectuals and reformers went into exile, including Josué de Castro, whose work had garnered international accolades by that time. The military dictatorship began to pursue a policy of decentralization, and supported municipal elections in an attempt to assert the government’s legitimacy and address entrenched patterns of local patronage (Williamson 2003; Bentley 2006). Alongside these dynamics, civil society in the 1970s and 80s had begun to form cohesive social movements and demand popular partici-

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pation in an array of governance areas (Doimo 1995). The military dictatorship began to gradually cede power, and momentum built up for social reformers, unions, and movements. This trajectory came to a head during the troubled and corrupt term of Fernando Collor de Melo, the first democratically elected president postdictatorship. Collor presided over a pronounced swing to neoliberal logics, extinguishing or paralyzing numerous health and food security–related programs (Bentley 2006). Massive protests helped spur impeachment proceedings and his resignation in 1992 (Skidmore 1999). In particular, the Movement for Ethics in Politics, which had a key role in Collor’s impeachment, maintained and even broadened social mobilization as it metamorphosed into the Citizens’ Action Movement Against Hunger and Poverty and For Life. The movement, headed by prominent sociologist Herbert “Betinho” de Souza, represented an extraordinary grassroots mobilization, with 7,000 local committees, and an emphasis on the responsibility of the state and all of its citizens, especially in regards to the right to food and a broader agenda of civil rights (Rocha 2001; Bentley 2006). Even before the end of the dictatorship, during a period of abertura (liberalization) in the 1970s, there had been an “explosion of popular participation in urban social movements, neighborhood associations, trade unions, and political parties.” As the dictatorship came to an end, these groups helped gather more than twelve million signatures in support of amendments brought to the National Constitutional Assembly of 1986–1988 (Caldeira and Holston 2015). The new constitution increased legal protections for movements and their allies, including the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), who championed participatory approaches and institutions (Bentley 2006; Bruera 2013). The new constitution further mandated decentralization of power and responsibilities to municipalities, which led in many cases to municipalities being delegated more prerogatives than the states containing them (Bentley 2006; Vaitsman, Rodrigues, and Paes-Sousa 2006). A general model of bringing government officials and representatives from civil society together was developed, with “almost every ministry [having] a specific council and almost every municipality [possessing] at least one type of council, in many cases because their creation is a legal requirement for the distribution of federal resources” (Bruera 2013, 181). Together, “government officials and representatives from civil society organisations . . . were responsible for social oversight for discussing general policy guidelines and for expressing policy preferences” (Bruera 2013, 45).

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In this context, the PT built a “Parallel Government” to promote its policies and ideas even while it lacked significant representation within the formal government. With its deep connections with social movements and progressive intellectuals and newly restored political freedoms, the PT set about formulating detailed plans for reform, including combating hunger. With 35,000 tripartite councils made up of representatives from state, civil society, and business set up between 1990 and 1999, taking on issues in health and social assistance, the PT seemed to be consolidating its agenda of redistributive reforms for social welfare, and a mass-based, “counterhegemonic” participatory approach to governance (Bentley 2006; Bruera 2013). The PT put forward a comprehensive approach to food security and strongly influenced the creation of National Food Security Councils in 1993 (Bentley 2006). After having endured long periods where technocrats’ limited conception of “rational governance” did not permit the political space to debate fundamental approaches to hunger, Brazil’s long dialectical relationship with food security entered a new phase (Peliano 2010, 30).

smasan’s approach to food security: all five a’s The political, social, and scientific understanding of food security in Brazil evolved significantly between World War I and the 1990s. The formation of SMASAN in 1993 reflected a key advancement. The politically ascendant PT had taken up many parts of the participatory, equity, and rights-based agenda of the country’s social movements. With the PT’s representation in public office surging, and in the context of significant public mobilization across the country, Patrus Ananias de Souza’s election as mayor of BH in 1992 gave him a clear mandate to advance the PT’s progressive agenda. Further, Brazil’s legacy of federalto-municipal connections and financial support gave Brazilian mayors significant latitude along with increased expectations from the public and a greater ability to deliver public goods (Fenwick 2009; Bruera 2013, 60–84). After his election, Ananias called a series of coordinating meetings between community leaders and professionals in health, education, nutrition, and social assistance. My interviews with long-term SMASAN staff members portrayed the initial moves of Ananias and SMASAN’s founding secretary, economist Maria Regina Nabuco, as aiming to generate consent and buy-in for this new government office that would administer all of the city’s food security–related programs.

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Ananias and Nabuco used this consultation process to gather consent and support from private and public experts and community leaders. They also took advantage of the growing knowledge in the area of food security to design a secretariat that would comprehensively address food insecurity at its roots. They instituted new programs and redesigned and improved on the numerous and often uncoordinated attempts of the past. They heeded research at the time that indicated the problems of food insecurity in BH were largely a result of high prices, barriers from urban infrastructure (or lack thereof), and uneven distribution of food outlets throughout the 350-square-kilometer city (Aranha 2000). Research at the time also indicated that nutritional imbalances were common in the city’s population, particularly in terms of insufficient intake of protein (milk and meat) and vitamins (fruits and vegetables). At the same time, low-income citizens spent almost 40% of their income on food. According to Aranha (2000, 53), this proportion of spending was twice as large as that spent on food by citizens who earned eight or more times the national minimum wage.11 Concurrently, almost 11% of BH’s population lived in absolute poverty, 20% of children five years old and under were either malnourished or at risk of malnourishment, and infant mortality for children under one year old was 34.4 deaths per 1,000 live births (as compared to 42.5 per 1,000 in Brazil at large and 23.3 per 1,000 in the more prosperous Rio de Janeiro) (Rocha 2001; Aranha 2003). Food insecurity once again corresponded closely to gaps in other basic rights. With a determination that the multifaceted problems of food insecurity demanded a multifaceted, comprehensive approach, SMASAN set out to address all of the necessary elements in a coordinated manner. The scale of the programs and their success were likely due in no small part to the cooperation with other municipal secretariats, as reported by multiple interviewees, including the secretariats of health, education, finance, and social assistance. Ananias, Nabuco, and their staff worked with professionals and clinicians in these areas to identify at-risk children and families, design programs to provide immediate aid to those most at risk, distribute educational materials, and find ways to fit new programs into the preexisting municipal budget. These initial moves reflected SMASAN’s foundation in and creation out of a multidisciplinary, multistakeholder process. A comprehensive—all Five A’s—approach to food security is, even at this writing, essentially still unprecedented in a city of BH’s size and may explain the progress SMASAN made. Rocha and Aranha (2003)

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argue that the centralization of food security functions under a distinct municipal office commanding its own budget was necessary in order to plan, coordinate, and execute SMASAN’s comprehensive mission effectively. This certainly seems plausible, given the ineffectiveness of previous uncoordinated efforts to implement food security policies at the national level. Locating all food security functions under one municipal office also allowed, as Rocha (2001, 37) describes it, “a fundamental review of how nutrition and food-related programs are perceived: from emergency (read ‘temporary’) and ‘assistance’ (read ‘marginal’) initiatives to regular policies deserving of the same status as other (more traditional) public policies in areas such as health and education. This, according to its founders and professional staff, has been [SMASAN’s] greatest accomplishment to date: to mainstream food security into municipal public policy (Pessoa and Machado 1999).”

SMASAN’s Structure As initially designed, SMASAN engaged in three “lines of action,” each represented by a department within the larger secretariat: (1) promotion of food consumption and nutrition; (2) food distribution; and (3) incentives for basic food production (figure 4, and tables 2–4). These mandates can be clearly seen in SMASAN’s founding legislation, Municipal Law #6,352 of July 15, 1993, which gave it the following duties:12 •

•

•

•

•

Coordinate the educational aspects of school lunches and secure nutritional assistance to the groups having the greatest biological vulnerability to malnutrition: children, the elderly, and expectant and nursing mothers. Plan and coordinate initiatives in the realm of food supply and combating hunger, including supplying information and direction to the population in order to advance their understanding with respect to the market, prices, and nutritional value. Plan and coordinate initiatives in the areas of credit, finance, and administration of the tools and programs that make up the municipal food supply system. Plan and coordinate initiatives organizing and incentivizing the production of basic foodstuffs. Regulate the market, directly or indirectly, through the statutory power of the city, with the option of reducing the prices of

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different food categories, while at the same time looking to reduce the distance between producer and consumer, benefiting both. The parallels with the Five A’s are immediately apparent. There are incentives for production (availability). There is direct nutritional aid to vulnerable populations, along with market regulation, price reduction, and nutritional assistance (accessibility and adequacy). There is the reduction of the physical and social distances between producer and consumer (accessibility and agency). There are the initiatives around and education about financial credit (which could contribute to agency for both consumers and farmers). Although not all aspects of each of the Five A’s are covered in the law, descriptions of SMASAN’s programs by one of its former functionaries elaborate on these ideas: “The necessary requisites of food security are sufficient availability of foodstuffs, which presupposes a food system integrated from the point of production to consumption, that supplies, in a stable nature and at accessible prices, essential foods for human consumption, produced in a sustainable manner; and accessibility to food, which presupposes access to sufficient income to acquire food, and to essential public services, to information on nutritional quality and to social rights” (Aranha 2000, 14, emphasis added). This application of the Five A’s predates Rocha’s formal enunciation of the framework later in the 2000s. It does lack specific reference to the components of acceptability, but acceptability forms an important part of the sensibilities of the programs, with many staffers maintaining that a foundational motivating goal of SMASAN was “food with dignity.” The programs’ attempts to support better farmer livelihoods can also be seen as addressing acceptability and agency, in that they attempted to maintain and improve the dignity and human rights of both consumers and producers.13 We can also see a comprehensive attention to the Five A’s reflected in the structures and types of programs SMASAN has administered over the years. Figures 4 and 5 show organizational charts for SMASAN in 2000 and 2017. Outlines of SMASAN’s programs as they existed in the mid-2000s can be found in tables 2–4. Although we will not review each of the programs, the next section will review some of the more prominent ones in order to further frame SMASAN’s approach and successes. The following section will also look more closely at the challenges and limitations that are part of SMASAN’s story.

Municipal Secretariat of Food Supply (SMAB)

Department of Food Supply System Management

Department of Administration & Finance

Department of Incentives to Production of Basic Foodstuffs

Nutrition and Food Assistance Services

Financial Services Development and Support Services for Food Supply Systems

Accounting Section

Administrative Section

Department of Defense and Promotion of Healthy Consumption

Materials and Facilities

Licensing Section

Oversight Services

Production, Processing, and Commercialization Support Service

Service for Orientation and Organization of Healthy Consumption Support Section for Community Purchasing and to Consumer Cooperatives

Monitoring of Food System Context & Prices

Section for Consumer Education Section for School Meals Section for Storage and Distribution of Foodstuffs

figure 4. SMASAN (then SMAB) organizational chart, ca. 2000. Adapted from Aranha (2000).

Section for Support to Agricultural Commerce Section for Expanding the Fruit, Vegetable, & Grain Sector

Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutrition Security (SMASAN)

Council on School Meals

Office of Administration & Finance Office of Finance and Budget Office of Procurement and Contract and Agreement Control

Office for Coordination of Popular Food Programs Office of Popular Restaurants Office of Meal Production for the Popular Cafeterias

Office of the Reference Center for Food and Nutrition Security

Office for Support to the Food System

Office of Education and CapacityBuilding for Food and Nutritional Security

Office of Administrative Services

Office of Licensing for Food System Equipment, Programs, and Fairs

Municipal Food and Nutrition Security Council

Office of Support for Food Production and Commercialization

Office for the Coordination of Food Assistance Programs Office of Schools Meal Programs and Nutritional Assistance

Office of Nutritional Design and Evaluation Office of Food Supervision Office for Education for Food Consumption Office for Storage, Distribution, and Quality Control of Foodstuffs

figure 5. SMASAN organization chart, ca. 2017. Adapted from PMBH (2017).

table 2. list of smasan support for basic food production programs, ca. 2003 Program (Initiated Date) School Meals (January 1994*) Service Points Beneficiaries

Results for 2002

181 159,460 preschool and primary school students

Popular Restaurant (July 1994) Service Points Beneficiaries

1 4,768 patrons/day

Meals for Childcare Organizations (September 1995) Service Points Beneficiaries

232 31,672 children aged 0 to 14 years

Meals for Shelters and Emergency Hostels (March 1996) Service Points Beneficiaries

26 962

Meals for the Disabled (May 1996) Service Points Beneficiaries

13 1,728

Youth Clubs (July 2000) Service Points Beneficiaries

18 658 adolescents

Centers to Prevent and Combat Malnutrition (June 1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

Meals for Childcare Centers (June 1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

129 7,640 babies and toddlers 2,282 nursing and pregnant mothers 1,102 other beneficiaries

9 619 children and adolescents

Food Assistance for the Elderly (June 1995) Service Points 29 Beneficiaries 1,135 Basic Food Baskets (November 1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

Not Reported 600 “at-risk” families (per month) 200 homeless families (per month)

Distribution of “Carry-Out” Lunches (November 1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

Consumer Education Service Points Beneficiaries

Not Reported 300 people/month during the rainy season (October–March)

1 370 people/month

source: Based on Machado (2003). *Transferred from the Municipal Secretariat for Education in 1994

table 3. list of smasan management and regulation of the market programs, ca. 2003 Program (Initiated Date)

Results for 2002

ABasteCer (1988; reinitiated and reformulated by SMASAN in 1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

23 100,000 families/month

Workers’ Convoy (1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

12 35,000/month

Popular Food Basket (1995) Service Points Beneficiaries

22 18,708 registered families

Open Fairs (since the foundation of Belo Horizonte) Service Points Beneficiaries

52 16,000 families/month

Model Fairs (July 1993) Service Points Beneficiaries

3 3,200/month

District Markets (since the mid-1970s) Service Points Beneficiaries

4 9,000 families

Bakery School and Pedagogical Kitchen (2000) Service Points Beneficiaries

1 400 students/month (average)

source: Based on Machado (2003).

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table 4. list of smasan promotion of food consumption and nutrition programs, ca. 2003 Program (Initiated Date)

Results for 2002

Straight from the Countryside (August 1994) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

34 250,000

Countryside Warehouse (October 1996) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

1 25,000

Organic Fair (September 2001) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

2 5,000

School and Community Gardens (October 1993) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

63 25,000

Offices for Agriculture in Alternative Spaces (October 1993) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

Varies NR

Pro-Orchard Program (May 1994) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

NR 7,000

Municipal Food Bank/Storage Center (May 1994) Attendance Points Beneficiaries

1 8,000

source: Based on Machado (2003).

major smasan programs and early successes The Popular Restaurant One of SMASAN’s most notable programs is its Popular Restaurant (Restaurante Popular) program, which in many ways has become its flagship program (for better and for worse).14 SMASAN, with aid from the federal government, cooperated with the Municipal Secretariat of Social Assistance to reinvigorate this decades-old Brazilian institution, with the first restaurant opening in 1994. By 2009, the program included three main facilities and several smaller “lunchrooms” in BH, with a new facility under construction. All told, the program serves 12,000–14,000 meals every day; primarily lunch, which is traditionally the largest meal for

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Brazilians (Câmara Municipal de Belo Horizonte 2006; Duffles 2013). Although the smaller lunchrooms have since been closed, the Popular Restaurant IV opened in 2010 in Barreiro, a neighborhood with some of the highest poverty indicators in BH (Rocha and Lessa 2009; G1 Minas Gerais 2016). This facility brought the total capacity of the program to over 20,000 meals per day (Duffles 2013). SMASAN has spent a significant amount of effort on considerations around the quality, kind, and price of food in the restaurants, aiming to pair adequacy and acceptability with accessibility. To this end, the meals are prepared from fresh ingredients and coplanned by local chefs and nutritionists. Forty to 50% of patrons classified the food as “excellent” in 2001 and 2003, an assessment I and all of my colleagues who have attended the restaurants over the years share. The 1,000- to 1,200-calorie lunches consist of rice, beans, a meat or vegetarian option, and salad or fruit. In terms of accessibility, for the first decade and a half of the program all patrons paid the same prices: one Brazilian real for lunch, and modest breakfasts and dinners for R$0.25 and R$0.50, respectively.15 The uniform pricing for the first seventeen years of the program was a source of pride for some program managers: that everyone paid exactly the same was thought to mean that there would be less or none of the social stigma sometimes associated with assistance programs. According to one informant, even those who had no money at all were assisted by being discreetly given one real by a social worker so that they could then be seen to pay their own way in the cafeteria. The act of discretion was meant for the first visit alone, followed by a meeting with an on-site social worker for assistance in looking for a job thereafter. However, it is unclear how regularly this system functioned. On at least one occasion, the booth at which I had previously seen the social worker sitting was empty. But that all patrons paid for the meals and that patrons come from a mix of income levels were repeatedly touted by my informants as key elements of SMASAN’s concept of “food with dignity.” There are several indications that SMASAN’s dedication to dignity have paid off in terms of maintaining quality and lowering stigma: the restaurants’ high-quality, low-cost meals draw a mixed clientele but mostly serve those with greater need. Based on five surveys of the first popular restaurant taken between 1994 and 2003, de Carvalho and colleagues (2007) found that patrons came from a wide variety of backgrounds, with the largest segment (22%) being retired, followed by the self-employed (13%), “others” (12%), private employees (11.5%), and the unemployed (9.5%). Over 50% of patrons had not graduated high

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school, while over 15% had some level of university education. In terms of economic background, the proportion of very-low-income patrons (with income less than twice the minimum wage, or ~US$2,500 per year) varied from 35–46% (de Carvalho et al. 2007). The proportion of patrons earning over four times the minimum wage varied from 21–26%. Similarly, a 1999 internal SMASAN study found that 86% of restaurant patrons were low- and very-low-income citizens who earned less than five times the minimum wage (~US$6,500 per year).16 So although popular restaurants may have originated from paternalistic, or even racist impulses grounded in “civilizing” laborers, the popular restaurants as revived in BH appear to be pushing in the direction of agency, accessibility, adequacy, and acceptability, with “food with dignity.” In addition, the first popular restaurant in BH was founded with a governing Patrons’ Council to encourage citizens’ agency. SMASAN’s commitment to a comprehensive and dignified approach to food security is further seen in the cultural activities, music, artwork, and displays of ethnic heritage at the popular restaurants, as well as in the dedication to preparing fresh, culturally appropriate food. In recent years, patrons have also been able to choose from two or more main dishes, including vegetarian options, raising the “acceptability” of the restaurants’ offerings. A brief anecdote illustrates the lengths to which SMASAN has gone to endorse a liberatory spirit of agency in its approach. At a food security conference in Canada, a former SMASAN administrator was asked whether BH worried about people stealing the metal silverware used in all of the restaurants. The former administrator began to gesticulate excitedly, searching for sufficiently strong words in English to express their perspective. Recalling our visit to a Canadian soup kitchen earlier, they emphatically stated that it was not dignified to give patrons plastic sporks and soup in paper cups. Yes, they admitted, patrons had stolen some silverware—at first. “At some point it stopped,” they concluded. “People only need so much silverware—and that was a price we were willing to pay.” School Meals Another SMASAN program also serves thousands of citizens each day: the Merenda Escolar (School Meals) program. All 218 municipal schools must have a kitchen and paid staff making most of the food served from scratch for 150,000 children a day (Rocha 2016a). The School Meals program is mandated to provide at least 15% of the daily

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nutritional requirements of children in municipal schools, which are open only half the day.17 Younger children who attend private daycares partnering with the city receive 100% of their daily nutritional requirements through the program, while other programs more specifically target and supplement the meals of older public schoolchildren for whom school lunch may be their only meal. Like the Popular Restaurant program, School Meals receives subsidies from the federal government. And like popular restaurants, the School Meals program has a heritage that includes both the calculating industrial logic of mid-twentieth-century technocrats and dictators, and the liberatory and rights-based ideals of SMASAN, the PT, allied scholars, and movement actors of the 1990s. For example, School Meals also connects to programs to instruct children in proper nutrition and a healthy diet. While there are clearly positive and liberatory bases for this, the connection to the last century’s technocratic efforts to instruct poor Brazilians in “rational” diets (so that they would be better workers) is hard to entirely ignore. On the other hand, SMASAN’s empowerment-based impulses have been influential. While SMASAN seeks to minimize or exclude processed food from school meals, they have also found a certain utility in offering a diversity of vegetables in the lunches in a context of “choice.” School officials at several facilities noted that many of the children were reluctant to eat their vegetables, and attempting to force them to do so leads to passive resistance and food waste. However, when students were presented with several different vegetables during one lunch and over the course of different meals and encouraged to at least try one each day to see if they liked it, officials found that choice and variety led to a lot of successful experimentation by the children and a lot less food waste. Similarly embracing the “acceptability” goals of the Popular Restaurant program, the School Meals program seeks to balance nutritional quality with tastiness and appeal. SMASAN’s support for maintaining or installing the facilities to cook fresh food in many of the schools has helped immensely. The programs meanwhile are supervised by a Municipal Council on School Nutrition composed of representatives of the teachers, city government, and students’ parents. Budget-wise, federal decentralization policies passed resources for the programs to the city government, and within the city government, SMASAN negotiated for School Meals to be transferred out of the Secretariat of Education and into its portfolio. While the historical associations with nutritional support to create better, healthier workers for the country’s economy cannot be entirely

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avoided, there seem to be clear manifestations of agency in the rhetoric and design of the School Meals programs, alongside attention to varying degrees of the other of the five A’s. Perhaps this is the best synthesis possible between the benefits and appropriate paternalism in educating and nourishing schoolchildren and the problematic technocratic utilitarianism of the past. Local Sourcing for City Programs The national Fome Zero programs have sought to systematically support small family farms in Brazil and local purchasing, particularly through the “Family Farm Food Purchase Program” (PAA). Although this federal program has been incorporated into SMASAN, local purchasing was a preexisting focus. For example, the School Meals and Popular Restaurants programs require significant amounts of food each day, especially vegetables. According to my interviews, local farmers provided nearly 100% of this in 2009, though this almost certainly included purchases from the state commodity centers (CEASAMinas—Centros de Abastecimento de Minas Gerais) and not just local farmer associations or individual farmers.18 There are many local, small, and family-owned vegetable farms in Greater BH, and in cooperation with five municipalities in the area, SMASAN buys as much produce as possible from associations of such farms. The purchases avoid sales through third-party intermediaries, meaning that the city receives lower prices while the small farmers receive higher incomes. This tactic has the added benefit of promoting rural social sustainability—especially important in a country in which poverty and social policy pushed the population from approximately 60% rural to 80% urban over the past fifty years (Rocha and Aranha 2003; Rocha, Burlandy, and Maluf 2012). In addition to selling directly to the city, SMASAN partner farms, which are all less than 50 hectares in area and mostly under 10 hectares, have the opportunity to participate in the Straight from the Countryside (or DdR for Direto da Roça) and Organic Fairs programs. In both programs, farmers are granted sales spaces throughout BH, originally located close to major thoroughfares and other highly frequented areas. Many farmers supply the Popular Restaurants, School Meals, and other SMASAN programs, but others participate only in DdR or the Organic Fairs throughout the city. The latter two programs provide unique opportunities for small farmers and consumers alike by eliminating the

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“middleman.” SMASAN has used them to address accessibility from two angles: locating the fairs and other programs throughout the city eases logistical and practical problems of citizens’ access, and transportation and price controls address restricted access due to economic limitations. And in accordance with SMASAN’s ideals of agency, human rights, and equity-based development, they have sought through these programs to provide living wages for farmers and reasonable food prices for poor consumers, support local production, and encourage direct interaction between consumers and farmers. Such interactions have proven valuable in building communication, social capital, and agency in other programs more familiar in the Minority World, such as the recent trends towards CSAs (community-supported agriculture groups). Serving Populations in Nutritionally Precarious Situations Alongside Popular Restaurants and School Meals, several other programs address the needs of populations “at-risk” for malnutrition. Up to the early 2000s, this included the distribution of enriched flour, which consisted of wheat with manioc, pulverized eggshells, and seeds, to expectant and nursing mothers and young children at risk of malnutrition. The program, while considered expensive, was also thought worth the cost given the high rates of infant mortality and malnutrition in BH when the program started. After under-five child mortality dropped by 72.6% and infant mortality by 59.2% between 1995 and 2005, the program was replaced with monthly distribution of two kilograms of powdered milk and a liter of cooking oil to families with children presenting undernutrition (Rocha 2009). This direct approach to support for families at risk of malnutrition is accompanied by nutrition, hygiene, and infant care programs conducted in cooperation between SMASAN, community groups, and the Secretariat of Health (who also partnered with SMASAN in the enriched flour program). The three partners offer educational events at health posts throughout the city, most notably in the poor neighborhoods called favelas or aglomerados. Attending a presentation at a community health center in a favela in 2003, I saw firsthand how an educational event explored the themes of self-respect and respect for others, appreciation of differences in color and race, basic hygiene, and nutrition through a puppet show and discussion with young children. A subsequent demonstration of how to make various fruit and vegetable juices to replace soda pop consumption in the home featured a young, local,

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and low-income mother, who declared that she no longer allowed soda in the house (except for her husband, who wouldn’t give it up). Her kids, she reported, hadn’t minded that she had replaced the soda with fresh juices. While this is an area ripe with tensions between paternalistic, “civilizing” impulses and genuine empowerment, what I heard when this young woman spoke about her experience has stood out to me ever since as an example of what agency can look like. While she thanked SMASAN and the health care workers, she clearly felt more in control of her decisions and better able to take care of her family, having learned about the nutritional deficiencies represented by soda and about healthy alternatives, alongside other programs at the center. Of course agency, and food security broadly, cannot be reduced merely to the supposedly freely informed individual choices of consumers (Guthman 2011). But as one part of a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to food security, that young woman and her palpable sense of empowerment has long been the bar against which I viscerally measure other such social service programs. Feeling “taught a lesson” and feeling that you have gained power and knowledge are not synonymous. From my point of view, in that moment, that mother was expressing her growing sense that she was an “agent of her own history”19—someone who can and ought to demand more from society when their rights are not being respected.

ABasteCer and the Workers’ Convoy Three other projects sought to allow lower-income and at-risk groups better access to higher variety and quality of foods. ABasteCer/ABC and the Workers’ Convoy were designed to stimulate the commercialization of basic foodstuffs in BH and the diversification of the network of food outlets, while the CP (Cestão Popular, Big Popular Basket) was meant to provide basic necessities for the very poorest populations. The ABC, which also stands for Alimentos a Baixo Custo (“Food at Low Cost”) is made up of a number of produce stores throughout the city where the prices of twenty to twenty-five products are controlled by SMASAN. The makeup of these products is determined by SMASAN, and the storeowner may sell whatever other additional products at whatever price they wish. The price-controlled products are served at a fixed price per kilogram: R$0.59 in 2006, compared to an estimated average market price of R$0.89. In 2013 the controlled price was set at R$0.92, or ~US$0.46, and the city estimated that 50 million kilograms of produce were sold to the equivalent of 6.5 million customers (i.e.,

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counting each visit by a repeat customer separately) (Duffles 2013). The set prices are typically above the costs of production (as calculated regularly by the city and academic advisors). But the main recompense for ABC partners is that they are given concessions on rent for the location of the price-controlled ABC, and in some cases concessions for another location for a (non-price-controlled) shop on city-owned land in wealthier or busier areas of the city. The ABCs sell a variety of produce at the same price to encourage variety and diversity in patrons’ purchases, helping to maintain cultural traditions of the use of various foods as well as encouraging a nutritious diet acquired from the different nutrients offered by different vegetables and fruits (personal observation; Deckelbaum et al. 2006). However, the array of ABCs did not extend into the poorest and most dramatically underserved neighborhoods. To address this gap, and a general lack of affordable, quality produce points in poor areas, the (now-defunct) Workers’ Convoy was meant to pop up at four centrally located points in the city throughout the week. The city provided use of these four points in prime, high-traffic downtown locations in exchange for the grocers’ participation in the Convoy. Participating grocers were obligated to go to peripheral (low-income or very-low-income) neighborhoods and sell produce on weekends at the fixed prices. The program was discontinued in the late 2000s, according to the city government, because the neighborhoods were too violent (Rocha 2016a)—a dynamic we will unpack further in the discussion of SMASAN’s challenges and limitations. Other Initiatives and Programs Education One key SMASAN priority is educating children and adults by way of school programs, community shows, food price lists for consumers, workshops, cooking classes, and more. These activities promote citizen ownership and participation (agency) and teach fundamental principles of nutrition. SMASAN and local communities have partnered to develop training and education programs to promote healthy and diverse diets and to disseminate concepts around food security. Regular courses are offered to disseminate information on nutrition and proper preparation of foods, orienting the population towards planning healthy menus at low cost. In short, SMASAN’s educational programs aim to provide further support for adequacy, acceptability, and agency.

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Community and school gardens SMASAN helps in the implementation and maintenance of gardens in community spaces to stimulate urban agriculture and self-sufficiency. In the public schools, gardens function as classrooms for nutritional education, and the food produced is integrated into the menus of the schools themselves. There were an estimated 126 school gardens and 48 partnering community gardens in 2012 (Duffles 2013). Additional SMASAN programs work to supply food to community organizations, retirement homes and facilities for the care of the elderly, and philanthropic groups. SMASAN accompanies, supervises, and promotes the training and empowerment of the relevant professionals in food service, preparation, and care, and keeps track of nutritional evaluations of the beneficiaries of these third-party-administered programs. It is important to note that these are only some of SMASAN’s most prominent programs. And in total, BH’s food security programs have made up less than 2% of the city’s annual budget, approximately US$9– 10 million dollars per year in the mid-2000s.20 Thus even given the current level of success, there is ample opportunity to expand the programs’ size and comprehensiveness. On the other hand, that low budgetary impact may paradoxically have limited some of SMASAN’s impact, as Rocha (2016a) argues, an idea to which we will return.

smasan: progress and problems The secretariat’s initiatives have produced some impressive results. At the same time, facets of its approach have struggled. Insiders and outside observers have long agreed that its initiatives need further support from the BH government: important gaps remain in the city’s food security coverage. To be fair, there always remains more to be done in an area such as food security; achieving all Five A’s is a marathon project. And in my conversations with SMASAN staffers, there has clearly remained an ethic of constant improvement. In my experiences, staffers have rarely used the word “success” in reference to SMASAN’s work. “Success,” they claim, would imply that the secretariat had completed its job and that food insecurity was no longer a problem. Similarly, in response to a question regarding the need for civil society to pressure, evaluate, and make demands of its government, longtime SMASAN staff member Rubens commented in an interview: “We’re never going to reach a certain degree of excellence in our work. I believe that. We always have to

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improve. We’re never going to reach perfection. We have to seek perfection. And we are able to reach these objectives when society is also pressuring us to.”21 But to get more specific than “not perfect,” there are a number of areas that were critiqued in my interviews with members of SMASAN, independent food security organizations, and some of their partnering local producers. A partial summary follows.

goals, successes, and challenges within the municipal secretariat of food supply Over the course of my participant observations and interviews with SMASAN staff members, there was a high degree of congruence in what was seen as SMASAN’s grand objectives, which reflected ideals similar to those underlying the Five A’s. But unsurprisingly, staff members also often focused on their own area, from “promoting family agriculture . . . and the practice of organic agriculture” to “training target populations” in BH in schools and businesses, and maintaining staff and meal quality in the Popular Restaurants and School Meals programs. Throughout my 2004–2008 interviews, all of the staffers felt that SMASAN was doing well in advancing its objectives, pointing to a variety of programs and innovations as specific examples. All mentioned that SMASAN’s programs had brought high-quality, low-cost food to low-income, poor, and vulnerable populations. The School Meals and Popular Restaurants program were most frequently mentioned. Several also mentioned the involvement of and support for small local producers in terms of bringing them into the city to sell directly to the consumer. One added SMASAN’s support for organic agriculture as an additional success. Another indicated the Straight from the Countryside and ABC programs as being more significant successes than School Meals, because the first two represented innovations and new approaches, rather than simply making preexisting programs work effectively. There was additional consensus about SMASAN’s success around educational support and empowering people to understand their own rights to food. A third staff member, Rubens, expressed it in terms of having created a general “culture of food security.” And there was ample reason for SMASAN’s staff to have felt good about its first ten to fifteen years. In the first two years of its existence, SMASAN established fifteen programs: Straight from the Countryside, School & Community Gardens, Workshops for Gardening in Alternative Spaces, Promotion of Orchards, the Center for Municipal Food

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Supply & Distribution, ABasteCer, Workers’ Convoy, Model Fairs, School Meals, Popular Restaurants, Malnutrition Prevention and Combat, Food for Community Support Centers, Big Popular Basket, Distribution of Carry-out Lunches, and Consumer Education. As elaborated in a 2003 report by then SMASAN staffer Moisés Machado, these programs, in addition to twelve more established by 1996, comprised 89% of all of the programs run by SMASAN by 2003 (see tables 2–4). By the same token, staffers indicated a sense of stagnation in the subsequent years (2004–2008). And despite their perceived successes, all of my interviewees expressed concerns regarding significant challenges for SMASAN in the mid-2000s in terms of a need for more financial, physical, and human capital. Each person indicated challenges and areas for improvement within their own area of specialization, from needing more resources and forming a partnership with the municipal secretary of the culture to designing and performing skits to teach food security to children and to promoting the establishment of an independent lab to analyze water quality on partner farms. While requisite resources are a common complaint within any government, the limitations noted by the interviewees also reflected critiques from Araújo and Alessio (2005) who found that “the Secretariat, however, doesn’t possess sufficient capacity in order to attend to the demands of the population, due to scarcity in human resources and infrastructure.” Outside of the general need for more financial support and staff was a uniform call for more dissemination of information on the secretariat’s work. All subjects agreed that the “general public” probably had only a vague notion of SMASAN at best. Interviewees stated that it was likely that most of the public interacted with or was aware of at least one program. For example, a given citizen may have children who receive school meals at a municipal primary school, or citizens with lower income or simply seeking low prices may shop at the ABCs or make up the thousands of patrons served by popular restaurants each day. But a recurrent theme was a lack of broad awareness of the existence of the secretariat itself. Every interviewee cited a lack of media exposure and the general need for more dissemination of information about the secretariat. As one representative assessment put it: [Knowledge of SMASAN] is [based on] word-of-mouth. . . . We don’t advertise, that is, mass media, television, things like that. . . . Around elections, there’s more talk about our programs. . . . Sometimes, people know of a project: “Ah, I know the Popular Restaurant!” “Do you know which secretariat is in charge of it?” “No.” . . . [So] I believe that, yes, the majority of

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the population knows [a program well], but sometimes they don’t know that it’s the Secretariat [for Food and Nutrition Security] that runs them. That’s the truth. Many times, they don’t know which secretariat is behind whatever project. They think sometimes that it’s the Health Secretariat. So, I believe there would need to be more publicity/dissemination, of what’s done by whom. Sometimes, within the city government itself, the functionaries themselves don’t know who’s in charge of a given project.

Accordingly, staff member Eliane admitted, given the lack of publicity, she herself knew little about the secretariat before entering employment there six months prior to our interview. And she had come from an undergraduate study of nutrition. “Look [at] what I studied, I had access to the studies,” she said, “I didn’t know what the secretariat did, you see?” An experience involving what many have called the city’s flagship program, the Popular Restaurants, is perhaps the most notable example of the insufficiency of locals’ knowledge about SMASAN. In his interview, Rubens shared this story: I was there. I talked with a patron who was in line. And I said, “Do you know whose restaurant this is?” He told me that it was run by some businessman. . . . [So] dissemination of information is not being done well. Communication is not being done well, right? So, we need to step it up . . . so that people will know who runs what program. [Otherwise,] if there’s something wrong, who are they going to complain to, you see? The population has a right to know this, so we need to be a little more daring and aggressive in our information . . . to show the population what’s happening in the city and who is doing it.

Without awareness of the programs conducted by SMASAN, the agency of the public—one of the Five A’s—is limited. If people served are not aware of who is running what program, or even what programs are available, then those who suffer from food insecurity are not able to effectively access the resources SMASAN is attempting to provide, nor are they able to effectively demand changes or air grievances. By a bureaucratic cascade, this gap in turn can impact appropriateness and acceptability. There have been additional challenges to SMASAN’s progress and ideals. After considerable internal debate, prices at the popular restaurants, for instance, have been raised at least twice since 2010. Current prices are R$3 for lunch, R$0.75 for dinner, and R$0.50 for breakfast, with homeless attendees receiving meals for free and low-income registrants of Bolsa Família, Fome Zero’s famous “Family Allowance” program, getting

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a 50% discount. These policy shifts reflect a change in the nature of the program, though how profound a change is hard to objectively assess. The price increases did address long-standing concerns of some of those within SMASAN and the federal government—specifically, that subsidizing prices for all patrons was not the best use of resources. And some argued that allowing Bolsa Família registrants to pay less was a suitable compromise between maintaining accessibility, targeting those with the greatest need, and the “food with dignity” character of being a paying customer. The compromise of a graduated price system also perhaps helped ease the transition, considering that patrons of all income classes had reported being in favor of a slight cost increase in the 2003 survey, but a majority rejected the highest increase polled ($R1.80) (de Carvalho et al. 2007). And even with the price increases, the amount charged does not cover the costs of preparing and serving the meals. So while price hikes represented a more than 100% increase, the city noted that the cost to produce each meal and a consumer price index both increased by more than 300% over the same period, and that minimum wages had increased by 700% (PMBH 2010). Nevertheless, the creation of a tiered pricing system undoubtedly changes the consciously class-blind approach originally taken by SMASAN. The significance of the change to the patrons of the restaurants has not been formally assessed, and given the lack of knowledge about SMASAN, it is questionable whether the secretariat’s original ideals were widely known (much less shared) among patrons.22 Further, the participation took a backseat to a degree of paternalism early on in the restaurants’ history, if for debatably justifiable reasons: the original Patrons’ Council was dissolved a couple years after the first restaurant opened. SMASAN administrators came to this decision after the council was reportedly hijacked by a citizen who SMASAN administrators complained was trying to use it to advance his own, unrelated political agenda. The city took back direct oversight and changed the role of the Patrons’ Council to an advisory one. There are other challenges to the PT’s participatory roots and SMASAN’s ideals. In terms of the now-defunct Workers’ Convoy program, then political science graduate students Cibele de Araújo and Maria Fernanda Alessio (2005) found concerns about safety to be one of its primary obstacles. The program was beset by a series of robberies and assaults on the trucks distributing the baskets. Araújo and Alessio hypothesized that “one possible reason for it is the lack of identification with the program.” Further contributing to that dynamic, few of the

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participating grocers had had a preprogram presence in the poorest areas they were meant to serve, and as such they were reluctant to go into them regularly even with the support of the program. This created a self-reinforcing problem where local community members and the grocers shared no established relationship or trust that might help mitigate or even prevent violence and theft. In the end, according to Araújo and Alessio, city officials felt that another SMASAN program, the Big Popular Basket (or CP, Cestão Básica) covered the needs of these communities sufficiently. CP similarly consists of mobile markets, run by SMASAN employees in this case, where twenty-four essential nonperishables and cleaning products are sold at low prices to residents of extremely poor neighborhoods who have met certain requirements and enrolled in the program. But Araújo and Alessio also considered the CP to lack the empowering character underlying SMASAN’s mission, even as all involved recognize the great need to find some way to serve the poorest populations. Still, the threats of violence and the gap in embeddedness in the community that torpedoed the Workers’ Convoy applied to the Big Popular Basket as well. Araújo and Alessio (2005, 17) continue that there have been inadequate and unrepresentative links between the local community and those recognized by SMASAN as partners and “local leaders.” Despite the need, in some cases, for police protection for the grocers and the fact that some of the attacks were conducted by supposed beneficiaries of the program itself, the Workers’ Convoy manager argued that there was significant popular participation and an expressive relationship between SMASAN functionaries and local leaders. But in Araújo and Alessio’s analysis, “what exists is a close relationship between two or three of the functionaries and a given ‘leader’” who does not actually represent the community. In Araújo and Alessio’s interviews, SMASAN managers contended that the disjunction reflects a lack of mobilization within the community, rather than a failure of the program or the secretariat. A telling quote from SMASAN staffer Rubens clarifies the view of some in the secretariat of its responsibilities, arguing that it includes capacity-building for citizens through education, but to some extent, stopped there: “So we, in our day-to-day work, or in our [joint citizengovernment] councils, or when we give a presentation, a course, a seminar . . . we carry a little of this information [on food security policies and programs] to them. . . .The secretariat isn’t going to call people and say something like, ‘Come here [as a] group, you have to make demands, because the city is very bad.’”

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This view is complicated by the fact that much of the population in the communities served do not even know of the program or its importance (Araújo and Alessio 2005). Here, Araújo and Alessio point out, arises a vexing “Catch-22” as “[SMASAN] justifies this fact arguing that, if the leader doesn’t represent the community, the problem is a lack of mobilization by the population. In fact, they are not completely wrong, but the State should be able to incentivize the creation of channels of interlocution so that the community and the Secretariat can, together, discuss questions and arrive at the necessary consensus.” As geographer Jesse Ribot wrote in a different context, but with regards to more or less this exact issue: “Those whose nutrition does not allow them the surplus energy required to engage in politics should be considered a class—the disenfranchised. . . . Emancipation requires sufficient wealth beyond mere subsistence to enable the individual, household, group or community to walk away from daily labor long enough to engage in shaping the political economy that shapes their entitlements” (2014, 695–96). Workers’ Convoy and Big Popular Basket—not to mention the Popular Restaurants program, to an extent—were meant to serve populations in exactly the situation of precarity Ribot describes. Similarly, within the SMASAN community gardens programs, my contacts within a BH nonprofit commented that they did not renew their partnership with SMASAN because the city, in their opinion, was not devoting enough time or resources to expanding participation within the community. Contacts at SMASAN, in turn, reiterated that it was beyond their capacity to engage in broad community partnerships, and that the pertinent communities needed to organize themselves so that SMASAN could interact with representative leadership. Direct involvement in creating community organizations, once again, was within neither their resources nor their purview. Araújo and Alessio (2005) also identified a contradiction in the designated goals of the price-controlled ABCs. Analyses by SMASAN describe the benefit of these produce stores to poor and low-income consumers (Aranha 2000; Rocha 2001; interviews with Rubens and Antônio), but Araújo and Alessio reported: The objective of the Abastecers isn’t to attend to the residents of [Belo Horizonte’s] pockets of poverty. Questioned in regards to this fact, the technicians and managers of the Secretariat emphatically emphasize that Abastecers cannot support themselves in locations where the population has the lowest incomes. There were some experiences in this and the produce shops

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ended up failing because the local population didn’t have the financial means to acquire such products. These technicians and managers admit that in these locations, some type of assistentialist [direct aid/welfare] program is still needed in order to meet, in the short term, the basic needs of the population. (2005, 14)

It is true that, in the best case, SMASAN’s provision of basic services would generate a self-reinforcing cycle wherein community members, relieved from the most acute food security problems, would be able to make use of, or demand the presence of, improved participatory channels that support their agency. It is exactly this kind of civil society involvement Brazil’s laws and its constitution mandate. On the other hand, such a level of involvement seems beyond the current capacity of many of the city’s poorest residents to initiate, with SMASAN facing both resource and philosophical challenges to supporting them.

conclusions Belo Horizonte represents a case of an extraordinary accomplishment in social policy, as has been recognized by diverse organizations within Brazil and beyond. The SMASAN functionaries I interviewed shared a passionate vision about food security that closely parallels Rocha’s Five A’s: availability, accessibility, acceptability, appropriateness, and agency. It is a vision that was enshrined in the creation of SMASAN and advanced by the work of its originators, then mayor Patrus Ananias de Souza and the late SMASAN secretary Maria Regina Nabuco. It is a vision that has lasted, at the point of this writing, for nearly twenty-five years, with numerous major gains to point to in its multisectoral approach. SMASAN programs secured availability as it relates to local production from small farmers and urban agriculture. SMASAN also ventured to support accessibility in a multitude of forms, with varying degrees of success. Acceptability emerged out of SMASAN’s initial partnerships with the City Secretariat of Education, and from its own staff of nutritionists and subcontracted cooks who designed, and continue to redesign, meals in city programs to be appetizing, healthy, and high quality. Acceptability emerged out of design standards and the inspections of produce shops that ensured them, out of focusing on preserving and amplifying local and traditional foods and recipes, out of the strong sense of the importance of appropriateness in terms of high standards for food safety and quality, and out of an awareness of the connections between food and the environment and a passion for making food production more sustainable.

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SMASAN’s attempts to inculcate agency and a “right to food” agenda, however, perhaps still suffers the most from the self-contradictory and inconsistent pattern reflected throughout Brazil’s food policy history. Although many staffers are dedicated to “food with dignity” and participatory democracy, SMASAN has done far better in terms of providing information and educational opportunities to citizens and schoolchildren than it has in establishing enduring public-private deliberative and counseling bodies. While I have witnessed SMASAN administrators welcome citizen action to monitor and improve SMASAN’s programs, through pressure for greater recognition of citizens and their rights, there appears to be a wide lacuna that remains to be addressed: who will support the rights of the “disenfranchised” to be emancipated (in Ribot’s terms) and how? BH has taken important steps in that direction, and offered hints at paths that may allow others to go further than SMASAN itself has, but has not resolved within itself to fully take on the fifth A, agency, as part of its own core mission. At the same time, its significant accomplishments, comprehensive approach, and liberatory ideals should not be discounted. It represented a substantial advancement on previous attempts and delivered results, even if it did not end all hunger in the city. SMASAN’s step forward from Brazil’s winding history of food security represented a complex interplay of public and political awareness of the problems of food security and how they differed from the simple, and simply insufficient, neo-Malthusian and technocratic approaches of the twentieth century. It was, in short, a messy, uncertain, and unpredictable process that led to SMASAN’s creation in 1993 and its work since. Its successes, incomplete as they are, required a great deal of work from many people, and a great many different factors to come together. This confluence of people and events, and what we can learn from it, is the topic of the next chapter.

chapter 4

Multiple Streams and the Evolution of the Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security

As we learned in the last chapter, it would be a mistake to disregard Brazil’s progress because it did not result in a straight-line path to universal food security. We would otherwise ignore the realities of social progress. But how was the Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security (SMASAN) able to get where it is, representing both the culmination of many less successful food security policy attempts in Brazil on the one hand, and the incomplete, though real potential to end hunger on the other? Having analyzed the way the framework and ideals of their policies helped contribute to their successes, and limitations, we will examine the steps in between SMASAN’s establishment and the long, strange road of Brazilian food policy that preceded it. Alongside the enticing simplicity of Malthusianism, there is a very common, intuitive understanding of how to improve the world. We often assume that the main obstructions between a problem and its solution are the dearth of a good idea and the willpower to put it into action. That is what is called the linear model of policy formation. From this perspective, real life often appears full of ineptitude, missed opportunities, incorrect strategy, and perhaps insufficient fortitude on the part of would-be reformers. And while all of those travails are indeed present in policy dynamics—as they are in all facets of life—they are neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding how policy change actually happens. In contrast, the model we will use to analyze SMASAN’s creation is based on recognizing the discontinuities, slow-gathering momentum, 101

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and disconcerting interruptions of random chance. This model, the multiple streams approach (MSA), is not only useful in helping us understand how BH’s programs emerged and their subsequent successes but also provides us with tools to try to distinguish an “unlucky” setback from one arising out of a fundamental flaw. The approach gives us a context for policy change and, as we will examine in chapter 6, broad institutional shifts. By way of Belo Horizonte (BH) and its food system, we will examine how such changes happen and what we can do to foster them in the right direction elsewhere. I will first turn to an analysis of the institutions at work in BH and SMASAN. Within a more theoretical framework, I will further explain how and why SMASAN has been able to pursue its programs. I aim to answer the important question of what specific factors enabled SMASAN to be created in both time and place, so that we may be able to generalize BH to understanding other situations and contexts.

the multiple streams approach to institutions Before continuing our in-depth study of the case of BH, we will more fully flesh out the framework we will be using. Political scientist John Kingdon, in his classic work Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, developed the MSA to analyze policy change. This work has been cited over 12,000 times since its first edition in 1984 (Cairney and Jones 2016).1 Paul Cairney and Michael Jones (2016, 38) note several advantages of the MSA over other current approaches in political science: it includes and develops fundamental concepts spanning multiple frameworks, offers a theoretical flexibility, and aspires to identify “universal” policymaking issues “that can arise in any time or place.” The MSA has also shown its usefulness in a wide variety of contexts, including analyses of policy dynamics within sixty-five different countries, at multiple levels of governance, in twenty-two different policy areas (Jones et al. 2016). In terms of the content of the MSA, the approach emphasizes the importance of policy windows, or periods where three process “streams” in governing institutions converge to facilitate significant agenda change. The streams are typically described as the problems, policies, and politics streams, modified by Kingdon from the classic work of Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972). The problem stream is a growing or sudden realization of a condition that society would like to see changed. The policy stream represents the knowledge and perspectives of specialists

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and experts in a given area of public concern. The political stream represents the currents of public office, such as the perceived general mood among constituents, public opinion, election results, changes of administration, and other political turnovers. The MSA assumes that these streams act semi-independently and join together to allow effective policy change at unpredictable moments. Political scientist Nikolaos Zahariadis (2014, 41) characterizes the assumption of the independence of problems, policies, and politics as a useful simplification, similar to the assumptions of human rationality economists and other social scientists accept in some models. It also happens that evidence for the streams’ independence—or more precisely semi-independence, in that they move predominantly according to their own internal logics but also influence each other—has been presented in numerous works, including Kingdon (2010) and Zahariadis (2014). As we shall shortly see, the assumption appears appropriate in BH’s case. Although the three streams flow along semi-independently much of the time, they occasionally, if somewhat unpredictably, join together in focusing on the same topic at the same time. When this occurs, it creates a window of opportunity for change—a policy window. Contrast this untidy and semirandom model with the linear model of policy change: the latter assumes that policy makers identify and assess the most important problem appropriate for action, systematically review and research possible solutions, and implement the best or most feasible approach. Kingdon (2010) convincingly argues that such an expectation fails to match observed dynamics in the many cases he studied, and indeed, most policy change research has found other “untidier” models of policy change to have greater empirical support (Baumgartner, Jones, and Mortensen 2014; Cairney 2016). As counterintuitive—or perhaps, disappointing—as it seems, there is ample and compelling testimony to the regularity of nonlinear decision making, at least as far back as the simulation models of policy change developed by Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972). They, and later Kingdon, came to describe the systems they were studying as “organized anarchies.” These are typified by (1) inconsistent and often ill-defined priorities; (2) a lack of clearly designed and straightforward “fixes” and governing mechanisms, with internal processes ill understood even by an organization’s own members and defined by a degree of trial and error; and (3) fluid participation, where participants vary in how much time and resources they can devote to a given problem, making the boundaries of the organization uncertain. Further, “organized anarchy”

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does not refer to a necessarily permanent state within an organization, but rather, a theory of organized anarchy will describe a portion of almost any organization’s activities, but will not describe all of them (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972, 1). The many problems in society that the public or people in government wish to see solved are multifaceted and seem overwhelming. Not all problems garner equal attention at all times, and attention may fade or falter even before a suitable solution is found—or in fact, because a suitable solution was not found ready at hand. Attention may pass from one set of problems to another, closing a policy window or moving on before one is opened in the first place. And while problems are of course affected by the two other streams—policies and politics—most societal problems pre-date any given political administration or policy approach. In fact, there is a large laundry list of problems for policy makers to address at any given time. Policy researchers and certainly political officials will be able to pay detailed attention to only a small fraction of these at any one time. But somehow, the problem stream must be joined with the other two for concerted action and policy change to occur around any particular issue, including hunger. According to the MSA, a series of prerequisites are necessary in order to bring attention to an old problem or a new one. These help to separate a condition—something that exists and can be tolerated—from a problem, which is a condition that is thought to require action. One avenue in policy processes is to recategorize or reframe a problem such that the pertinent actors come to see it as “appropriate for governmental action” (Kingdon 2010, 111). For their part, policies—potential solutions to problems—do not always, or even commonly, develop in response to the most prominent problems at a given time. Rather, in this stream, academics, technocrats/ career bureaucrats, independent organizations, and others come up with solutions that most concern them due to personal interests, concerns, or agendas, or in response to problems or political imperatives that arose in a previous time period. This stream is semi-independent of the other two at least in part because a societal problem is not usually solvable within the time frame that it garners widespread attention, and as such inertia and independent interests may dictate what solutions continue to be developed before, and even after, the time period when “their problem” sits at the top of the larger societal agenda. This temporal gap is akin to what Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972) referred to as the “garbage can model.” Here, proposals and ideas are dumped into different garbage cans or “containers” as they accumulate, to be later examined

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haphazardly when a problem finally makes it to the top of an agenda and political actors are actively looking for a solution. In the MSA model, a refinement of the garbage can model, a sort of natural selection in a “policy primeval soup” takes place in terms of possible policy solutions: a large pool of ideas generated by academics, think tanks, and civil servants or technocrats. Ideas float around and recombine. New policy ideas form and some old policy ideas fade. Some survive and prosper. Eventually some policy proposals may be taken more seriously than others or meet criteria relevant to decision makers at that time. Over time the public and the community of specialists are “softened up” in regards to certain proposals. Such a “softening up” consists of, to some extent, ideas floating in and out of fashion for a period of time, as “government does not work on ideas quickly,” writes Kingdon (2010, 130), so “to become a basis for action, an idea must both sweep a community and endure.” Finally, the stream of politics represents the vagaries of public mood and public officials, as elections bring different groups and people into power, politicians perceive a new mood on the part of their constituents, shifts occur in partisan or ideological distributions within a governing body, and politicians respond to interest groups or personal motives. Despite their semi-independence, the three streams quite obviously interact with and affect one another. Although “solutions are developed whether or not they respond to a problem” and “the political stream may change suddenly whether or not the policy community is ready or the problems facing the country have changed,” their interaction can be seen in various instances (Kingdon 2010, 88). For example, Kingdon continues, “The criteria for selecting ideas in the policy stream . . . are affected by specialists’ anticipation of what the political or budgetary constraints might be. Or election outcomes in the political stream might be affected by the public’s perception of the problems facing the country.” However, “despite these hints of connection, the streams still are largely separate from one another, largely governed by different forces, different considerations, and different styles.” These characteristics therefore make what Kingdon calls policy windows—times when the streams align—and policy entrepreneurs—people who are able to effectively influence and make use of such alignments—so important. Those prepared to address a given agenda change and ready to spend resources advocating and organizing for it, the policy entrepreneurs, come to the fore as factors in coupling the streams during an open policy window.

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Policy entrepreneurs are advocates for proposals or ideas, who invest their resources in hope of a future return. Policy windows are unique chances to advance agenda change. They open with a noticeable shift in one of the streams—a problem brimming to crisis, a change of administration, or perhaps a shift in the mood of the polity. Policy entrepreneurs are able to quickly seize on such openings, attach solutions to problems, overcome constraints, and take advantage of politically fortuitous events. Out of twenty-three case studies in his original research project, Kingdon found policy entrepreneurs to be very or somewhat important in fifteen and unimportant only in three. They were, in effect, figures that would not have been sufficient to change policy alone, but nonetheless had a central role in its enactment. Based on this, we will focus on the evolution of three phenomena aligning with Kingdon’s agenda-setting “streams” of problems, policies, and politics. In BH we find the confluence of a recognition of the problem of food security among politicians and the public, the presence of innovative policy ideas to address food security, and the politics of the moment. These dynamics, together with the action of some key figures, helped advocates to take advantage of a juncture that was arguably ripe for the implementation of these policies, moving BH several steps further down the path to ending local hunger.

organizing anarchies: the problem stream and the founding of smasan People do disagree about what they want government to accomplish, and often are obliged to act before they have the luxury of defining their preferences precisely. —John Kingdon (2010, 85)

Kingdon’s description, written with the U.S. federal government in mind, seems equally applicable to SMASAN and BH’s food security organizations. Kingdon reminds us that different actors, with different agendas, moving in and out of the decision-making process, fit very well with what earlier researchers (e.g., Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972) found. The nature of the problem stream, composed of issues that need to be addressed within a society and the process whereby they are recognized (or fail to be recognized), can be observed nearly note for note within the SMASAN structure in several ways and at several points. Problems in society are affected by politics and policies, but typically pre-date any given political administration or current policy approach.

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Problems with hunger, for example, may be exacerbated or ameliorated by policies enacted by a given administration, or altogether ignored, but at the very least food insecurity and hunger in Brazil preexisted SMASAN and depended on a large number of factors outside of current policies and politics, from history to climate change and geography. Further, as Kingdon (2010, 114) puts it, “problems abound out there in the government’s environment, and officials pay serious attention to only a fraction of them.” Which problems get addressed during a policy window is a function not just of the problem identity itself, but also policies and politics, which we will return to shortly in the context of SMASAN. In terms of the problem stream itself, however, there is still the question of its development before and during the initial organization of SMASAN in 1993. Bringing attention to a problem, old or a new, requires considerable effort, making such an effort, according to Kingdon (2010), “a major conceptual and political accomplishment” (115). One path forward is to define (or redefine) the problem as something the public and decision makers can recognize as a problem “appropriate for governmental action” (111). Into the early 1990s, as Adriana Aranha (2000) points out, the analyses and government actions in Brazil around food security were still diverse and incoherent, and the right to food was still associated with a negative clientalist/welfare state connotation. And although the problem of food insecurity in Brazil had long been considered important, it had yet to be systematically addressed, certainly not from the vantage of inequality and poverty as opposed to putatively insufficient production. The Workers’ Party (PT) and its Parallel Government bestowed some recognition upon the greater breadth of the problem beyond insufficient availability, and the ideas of food as a human right gained strength as neo-Malthusianist perspectives waned after the World Food Crisis of 1972–1974 (Aranha 2000). In fact, the Parallel Government’s stance on food security was grounded in the broad, multisectoral approach to food security and the right to food elaborated in their 1991 document “A National Food Policy,” itself based in part on a nigh-revolutionary 1985 proposal from the Brazilian Federal Ministry of Agriculture (Takagi 2006). These contributions together laid down part of the foundation for a widespread reframing of the issues. The reformulation of food security as a right within the PT is certainly part of the reason it appeared near the top of BH’s agenda when PT member Patrus Ananias won the mayoralty in 1993. Besides his membership in the PT, Ananias had a further personal commitment to

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the issue. Ananias reportedly saw addressing the right to food as not just an important sociopolitical goal but an important part of honoring his Catholic faith (based on comments during participant observation in June 2003, from a longtime staff member of Ananias, echoed as well by other sources).2 In addition, in accordance with the MSA, systematic indicators pointed to other major problems connected to food security. Lastly, although major crises can aid problem recognition, Kingdon (2010) points out that visibly chronic problems are less dependent on crises for recognition. While not universal, malnutrition was hardly uncommon. According to Aranha (2000), one study found 15.5% of the population of BH suffered from malnutrition in 1993 and 12.3% of the infant mortality rate was reported due to malnutrition, with infant mortality at 34.4 deaths per 1,000 live births citywide and as high as 64.6 per 1,000 live births in the poor aglomerado of Taquaril (Somarriba et al. 1998, as cited in Aranha 2000). The problem stream appeared primed for action in regard to food security in BH in 1993.

policies and policy entrepreneurs during the formation of smasan They often don’t know how to accomplish what they want to accomplish, even if they can define their goals. If they want to eliminate poverty, for instance, the technology to do so is quite elusive; it’s not like making widgets. —John Kingdon (2010, 85)

During SMASAN’s founding, municipal functionaries and partners appeared to have contributed significant innovation. As we saw in the previous chapter, SMASAN established many programs nearly immediately after SMASAN’s foundation: fifteen programs between 1993 and 1995 and twelve more programs by 1996. While we saw a number of examples in chapter 3 wherein SMASAN programs did not work as intended, or fell short of their initial goals, a few more will be outlined here as we explore their relationship to the policy stream of “solutions.” As Kingdon (2010) intimates, the “technology” to address the difficulties in providing full food security for the entire population of BH is unclear. Within the policy stream, it is not readily apparent which solutions to apply to all of the problems facing SMASAN as an organization in general and as the specific office in charge of guaranteeing the right to food. Providing food security is in point of fact not like making widgets. A principality cannot just plug

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in established, predesigned (policy) machinery and necessarily derive a positive or even predictable result. SMASAN’s attempts at addressing food security through a variety of programs and policies at different levels of success align with the MSA’s conception of policy streams in an organized anarchy. The MSA’s view of a process of “natural selection” in a “policy primeval soup” is also apt. Brazil’s history shows that the food security concepts later employed by SMASAN had been circulating in the “primeval soup” for some time, including the 1985 Ministry of Agriculture document mentioned earlier this chapter and its modified version that was adopted by the PT’s Parallel Government in 1991. A number of the SMASAN’s more successful programs emerged out of reinvigorating or redesigning preexisting ideas, such as Popular Restaurants (whose antecedents were mostly closed down by the military dictatorship). One popular restaurant meanwhile operated in BH as a private entity between 1988 and 1992. The city rebooted that restaurant with the launch of the SMASAN program. And the School Meals program was long a federal program, “municipalized” and reconceptualized under SMASAN (Belik 2003; Takagi 2006). As per the MSA, the characteristics of the policies themselves matter. Policy making is not simply a cynical process of the raw workings of power, influence, pressure, and strategy. Not that these do not matter— they matter quite a bit—but, following Kingdon (2010, 125), “If we try to understand public policy solely in terms of these concepts, however, we miss a great deal. . . . Government officials often judge the merits of a case as well as its political costs and benefits.” The MSA proposes three criteria by which ideas typically survive in the policy primeval soup: technical feasibility, value acceptability within the community of specialists, and anticipation of future constraints, especially budgetary. In some cases, the strict technical feasibility of the initial SMASAN programs was plain. Many were preexisting programs, showing that they had at least some minimal level of feasibility. Other SMASAN programs had some antecedents. The National Program for Food and Nutrition (Programa Nacional de Alimentação e Nutrição or Pronan), introduced under the military dictatorship in the 1970s, looked to support and buy from small farmers, address inequality, distribute unprocessed foods to vulnerable groups such as pregnant and nursing mothers and young children, and encouraged, subsidized, or legally mandated lower prices in poor areas (Takagi 2006). These programs also suffered from poor planning and underfunding, an absence of focus on low-income groups

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and less developed regions of the country, inconsistent service, excessive centralized federal control, contradictory or even redundant efforts distributed across various institutions, a confusing alphabet soup of acronyms, problematic federal centralization of food purchases, and the use of processed foods, contributing to poor nutritional habits in the population (Aranha 2000; Takagi 2006). As Kingdon (2010, 128) describes, besides demonstrating a level of minimal technical feasibility, the prior existence of the relevant ideas can help in “softening up” policy communities and public support: “Then when a short-run opportunity to push their proposals comes, the way has been paved, the important people softened up. Without this preliminary work, a proposal sprung even at a propitious time is likely to fall on deaf ears.” To foreshadow discussion below, savvy planning and significant federal funding and contributions for several programs, including the School Meals program and towards food purchases for Popular Restaurants, minimize costs to the city budget—approximately 1–2% of all expenditures (Rocha 2016a; Machado 2003; Nabuco and Souki 2004). Of course, low cost and subsidies simultaneously depend on the strategic consolidation of food policy into SMASAN and extensive cooperation with other departments, especially the municipal secretariats of health and education. These departments, as Aranha (2000, 118) describes, did not necessarily share the views of Nabuco and Ananias as the two were forming SMASAN: “It wasn’t easy to break the internal resistances . . . from a secretariat that has been established and consolidated for some years, like Education, for a new secretariat, still in the implementation phase.” Kingdon emphasizes the ways and means by which policies are facilitated by close-knit policy communities (and slowed down in fragmented ones). Although the food security policy community was not large in 1993, nutrition was already part of the Secretariat of Health’s remit, and the budget for school meals was located in the Secretariat of Education. That is, policy specialists across secretariats had to be convinced as well. Under those conditions, a policy entrepreneur can be invaluable. By Kingdon’s definition, a policy entrepreneur’s primary characteristic is “their willingness to invest their resources—time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money—in the hope of a future return. That return might come to them in the form of policies of which they approve, satisfaction from participation, or even personal aggrandizement in the form of job security or career promotion” (2010, 122–23). That is, policy entrepreneurs

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may be advocating “pet solutions,” pursuing personal interests such as boosting a career or expanding bureaucratic turf, or promoting their values and shaping public policy, or they may be what Kingdon also describes as “policy groupies,” people who enjoy advocacy, being part of the action, being part of “the game.” Clearly Ananias and Nabuco were looking to advance solutions that meant a great deal to them personally. In addition to Ananias’s personal commitments vis-à-vis his faith, Nabuco was an economist with a focus on food policy and nutrition. They were also part of efforts aimed at promoting the values and interests of the PT, both in terms of the egalitarian and reformist goals of the PT and of its electoral interests in fulfilling promises and raising the profile of the next wave of party politicians. In my interview with Rubens, he recounted Ananias’s role in similar terms: “He had a true obsession, he wanted to do something very visible, very palpable, that gave results, in the area of food security. So, he created the secretariat. . . . That was the great landmark. . . . It was the political determination of the PT and of Mayor Patrus Ananias. It was from that vision that he created the basis for creating the secretariat in the mold of what it is today.” To be certain, as one of the founders of the party, Ananias had a vested personal and political interest in the success of the PT, and as a politician who went on to higher elected office in the national Congress before being appointed minister of social development and the combat against hunger under PT president Lula. It would be reasonable to conclude that he placed a premium on activism, as he participated in what has been described as the “democratic and social fights that resulted in the formation of the PT” (MDS 2008, n.p.). As a lawyer, he had focused on workers’ rights and social security rights. If not a policy groupie, Nabuco was more the academic and interested in food policy in both its theory and application. Whereas interviewees mentioned the key role Ananias played in the creation of SMASAN, most also emphatically highlighted the importance of Nabuco as an equal or even greater contributor. In regards to their motivations and SMASAN’s creation, José put it this way: “The governing politicians wanted it, and had food security as [their] priority at that time. Why? With this political will, they invested financial resources, assembled a good team. I believe that whatever the public policy, if you do not have political will, it’s not going to go forward.” José essentially describes here the role of a policy entrepreneur in bringing an idea to fruition when the problem, policy, and political streams are aligned.

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SMASAN’s creation was naturally complicated by the necessity for cooperation from other departments to develop initial programs, including reforming the preexisting federal School Meals program. The health and education secretariats eventually helped research, design, and plan nutrition strategies. The two secretariats partnered up with SMASAN for the Project to Prevent and Combat Malnutrition and ceded supervision and financial control over the federal funds for the School Meals program. But to get to that point, the secretariats’ agendas and the sentiments of their policy community had to be aligned with that of Nabuco and Ananias, even while many health officials were not yet familiar with the concepts of food security (Interview 699A-006, July 2006). That is, it is very likely that the problems and policies streams within the secretariats of health and education were not in the same place as within the fledgling SMASAN, nor completely of a piece with the agendas of Nabuco and Ananias, who, as policy entrepreneurs, had to build agreement across partners. For this reason, the two founders of SMASAN organized a study commission, made up of economists, social workers, educators, health professionals, and functionaries of the Urban Activities Secretariat’s Department of Food Supply. Over a series of seminars, the group discussed malnutrition and food security, with Nabuco and Ananias reportedly acting as coordinators rather than dictating their analysis or simply overruling the analysis of the other professionals (participant observation, June 13, 2003; Araújo and Alessio 2005). As Aranha (2000) describes it: The search for consensus was a distinctive characteristic of these social projects in the area of food security and, along with that, one observes that they were establishing the divisions of attributes and functions between the secretariats. If the integration of social policies is one of the challenges put before public figures, in the area of food and nutrition it becomes fundamental. The success of a public intervention around food security depends on the intersectoriality of diverse public policies. (118)

Through the efforts of policy entrepreneurs Nabuco and Ananias, not only was relative consensus achieved, such that the Secretariat of Education agreed to redirect their funds for the School Meals program to the new Secretariat of Food Supply, but also an ongoing partnership with the Secretariat of Health was established to help SMASAN identify and gain access to the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the city. This was particularly effective because Brazil’s universal health care system meant that the Secretariat of Health had posts in practically all parts of BH, including the poorest neighborhoods where there was otherwise a

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dearth of government offices. Additionally, Nabuco and Ananias reportedly hired many nutritionists during the initial formation of SMASAN, eventually employing more nutritionists than the Secretariat of Health, as they found that professionals from other disciplines, such as health and social work, found it difficult to follow the new and expanding conceptualization of “food security,” as opposed to a more classic welfare/clientalist approach based on social work (Aranha 2000). Thus, as in Kingdon’s policy stream, at some point a tipping point is reached, as a proposal suddenly gains in popularity as more people discuss it. The repetition serves as its own rationale, and the proposal begins to be taken more seriously. The dynamic is quite visible in the evolution of the concepts of food security in Brazil since World War II. Long-held beliefs about availability as a root cause of hunger waxed and waned in the community of specialists until consensus congealed within a part of the policy community and within the public sphere, as in the platform of the Parallel Government, around the importance of food accessibility, acceptability, appropriateness, and agency. In the early 1990s, these terms were not explicitly used as part of a consistent Five A’s approach, but the analysis employed by Nabuco, Aranha, Ananias, the Citizens’ Action Movement against Hunger and Poverty for Life, and others highlighted the importance of moderating the market through price controls and wider distribution of foodstuffs. We see accessibility via the ABasteCer (ABCs), Popular Restaurants, and Big Popular Basket programs. We have monitoring of the quality, hygiene, and nutritional sufficiency of food. For acceptability, there are the standards demanded in all SMASAN programs, especially Popular Restaurants, ABCs, and School Meals. There are efforts aimed at getting food from small farmers and encouraging organic agriculture. The notion of appropriateness is found in the Straight from the Countryside program, organic fairs, and the right to food and the notion of popular participation. Agency is supported by SMASAN education programs, requirements for Straight from the Countryside farmers to be part of a Farmers’ Association, and joint citizen-government oversight groups such as the Food Security Council (Conselho de Segurança Alimentar or COMUSAM) and the School Meals Council (Conselho de Alimentação Escolar or CAE). The relatively large number of programs enacted in the first two years of SMASAN also implied a snowball effect as Nabuco and Ananias proposed ideas within the secretariat and in conjunction with their partnering groups. The idea to provide enriched flour to expectant mothers and malnourished children, distributed at health

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posts, reportedly grew out of the initial planning seminars with health, social work, and education professionals. The multipronged approach of SMASAN since even its early days reflects yet another aspect of Kingdonian policy streams, “the importance of a viable alternative” (Kingdon 2010, 139). Food security was a problem that had moved up the agenda, but as Kingdon notes: “Items are sometimes found on a governmental agenda without a solution attached to them. . . . It is not enough that there is a problem, even a quite pressing problem. . . . The subject with an ‘available alternative’ is the one that rises on the agenda, crowding out equally worthy subjects that do not have a viable, worked-out proposal attached” (2010, 142). Food insecurity was not only a problem that had arisen repeatedly and was in the public eye in 1993 due to social movements, consensusbuilding by Nabuco and Ananias, and an inherent urgency. It was also a problem with a seemingly “deep bench” of possible solutions. Even with so many possibilities circulating, a surprising number of food security policies were passed in the early days of SMASAN, at a clip that far outmatches the progress of the following twelve years. Why was this possible? Why has such a momentum been unreplicable since? We arrive, then, at the importance of the politics stream, which we will review in reference to SMASAN’s formation before moving on to an overview of all three streams as they stood in 2008.

the politics of food policy in smasan In our discussion of Ananias and Nabuco’s roles as policy entrepreneurs, we touched upon the politics of the situation in BH and their role in moving food security forward. Through this nexus the policy and political streams were connected. It is important to note, however, that the two streams developed somewhat independently. Professor Nabuco was contributing to the literature on nutrition and policy before being tapped for secretary. The academic discourse on hunger and its move away from Malthusianism (notably influenced by the ideas of Amartya Sen) pre-dated the PT’s Parallel Government and its rise to power. Brazilians meanwhile had been worried about, and developing policies to address, problems of hunger, poverty, and inequality for decades. But the PT’s rise to power, particularly the election of Ananias in BH and his interest in food security, coincided with a surge in the academic bases of food security itself, the long history of hunger in Brazil, the popularity of Betinho and the Citizens’ Action Movement, and the latter’s dedication

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to issues of human rights and equality. The three streams aligned in such a way that prepared and dedicated policy entrepreneurs were available in the persons of an elected politician and his appointee to head the new secretariat. To be sure, such convergences are no faits accomplis. President Fernando Collor de Melo dismantled much of “Brazil’s nascent welfare state,” privatized a number of government functions, and cut back or deemphasized a number of policies and policy instruments around health and nutrition in a bid to control inflation (Bentley 2006, 34). In 1995, Fernando Henrique Cardoso ended National Food Security Councils in favor of an alternate approach arguably focused on poverty and “integrated action with different social actors” in terms of public/governmental and civil/private partnerships (Pessanha 2002, 23; see also Bentley 2006). That is to say, in regards to BH, other politicians may have regulated hunger as a secondary priority, aligning themselves with the federal level under Collor and Cardoso. Collor and Cardoso arguably pursued their policies in response to rampant inflationary problems, although Lavínia Davis Pessanha (2002) argues that these politicians also offered an insufficient break from earlier national policies fixated on clientelism and assistentialism as an effort to strengthen their own political and electoral power. Thus, even though the creation of SMASAN coincided with a desire to address food security among a large part of the polity and within the PT, the political fate of food security institutions in BH and Brazil at large were hardly predestined. Other work recognized the importance of the Citizens’ Action Movement Against Hunger and Poverty and For Life (Aranha 2000; Rocha 2001; Takagi 2006). As with the variety of competing agendas across politicians, academics, and professionals at the health and education secretariats, the movement itself presented a multifaceted agenda targeted at a variety of problems. There was its support for the redistribution of food to low-income Brazilians (Araújo and Alessio 2005). But there were additional objectives focused on capacity building, income generation, urban agriculture, and agrarian reform across its 7,000-plus local committees (Bentley 2006). Indeed, the group was originally formed in large part around the Movement for Ethics in Politics, which successfully pursued the impeachment of President Collor for corruption in 1992 (Valente et al. 2001 as cited in Bentley 2006). In 1993, President Itamar Franco responded to the Citizens’ Action Movement and pressure from the PT Parallel Government by initiating programs around the “Map of Hunger.” The map did not fully respond to the

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requests of movement leader Herbert “Betinho” de Souza, who had been pushing for a survey of both national nutrition deficits and areas of food production in order to connect those lacking food together with channels of production (Takagi 2006). The Citizens’ Action Movement could be considered both a public interest group and a legitimate expression of the national mood under the MSA. That is, it clearly counts as the former as a group advocating reform and government policy targeted at providing basic human rights. But the enormous popularity of the movement and its leader Betinho and the seeming depth of participation imply that it addressed the concerns and opinions of many Brazilians. Whereas Kingdon (among many others) has pointed out that public interest groups often have a surprisingly small number of adherents, and that national mood only vaguely resides in the mass public due to contending perceptions among politicians, the media, and groups of the public themselves, the Citizens’ Action Movement could make a legitimate claim of representing a large portion of the population. And as a public interest group with stated, if varied, objectives, the national mood as reflected by the movement resonated with a particular clarity. However, alongside interest groups that are honestly advocating for change are arrayed groups within the political stream that have been referred to as “pseudoadvocates.” These interest groups jump into the arena when an issue is already gaining popularity in order to play a part in the outcome in case the status quo is indeed abandoned. One example within the area of food security is the Brazilian Association of Agribusiness and its Administrative Council, representing the industries of fertilizers, pesticides, heavy machinery, seeds, large producers, fiber and food processing, supermarkets, and importers and exporters. Formed in 1993, the association presented its own position paper on food security. Focusing on economic aspects, the association asserted that the state should not directly intervene in food and agriculture, but rather guarantee food security by way of supporting modernization and dynamism within the agricultural sector. In this way, it argued, the market could create a supply of the necessary supplements and higher food production to generate food security for the Brazilian population (Pessanha 2002, 16–17). In the same passage, Pessanha cites Paulo Marques (1996) who identified this notion of food security by agribusiness as “nothing more than an instrument for the legitimization of the modern discourse employed by the Brazilian agro-industrial complex.” In short, pseudoadvocates “are not genuinely interested in pushing the cause.

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They advocate their own plans in the event, likely or unlikely, that an issue of concern to them becomes a serious threat to their interests,” (Kingdon 2010, 162) as “even enemies of change introduce their own proposals in an attempt to bend the outcomes as much as they can to their own purposes” (Kingdon 2010, 161). In the case of BH, no pseudoadvocates have been mentioned in the literature or by interviewees or seemed readily apparent. The evolution of thought on hunger in Brazil and in the literature, the pressure from and extreme popularity of the Citizens’ Action Movement, the recombination of ideas old and new within policy communities, the commitments and aspirations of the PT and its leaders, among them Ananias—all affected the political stream. There is at least one more factor to consider: multiple jurisdictions. When an idea or proposal cuts across multiple agendas, it can act either as a spur or a brake. If an issue is perceived as popular, no competing politico wants to be perceived as being late to the game, and bureaucrats often wish to take action first in order to have some control over events. Collor’s and then Cardoso’s reactions and initiatives left a space open for other politicians and bureaucrats to more effectively address issues that are prominent in both the public eye and within a pressure group that at that point enjoyed historic levels of mobilization. The multidimensionality of the problem of food security served as a potential brake as it required a multisectoral approach, eventually involving the secretariats of education and health among others. Specialized agendas—for instance, a health- or education-focused remit— meant that certain important items might not be paid attention to “even though they could easily be [high on an agenda] in some conceptual sense” (Kingdon 2010, 159). Interest in certain cross-disciplinary issues may be unevenly distributed across government structures. Ananias and Nabuco, in addition to all of the other organizational and anarchical factors, worked to bring agendas together, and in part convinced the secretariats of education and health to chip in expressly because food security was not actually their primary area of expertise. For example, Aranha pointed out to me in 2003 that SMASAN was able to convince these other secretariats to pitch in because they did not want to spend their resources administering programs that were not their remit. According to Aranha, Ananias and Nabuco asked the Secretariat of Education if it wished to spend resources designing nutritional school lunches when its focus was on effective ways to teach children. Refocusing the problem this way and building a consensus across previously normative disciplinary lines paid off in terms of eventual cooperation across city departments.

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Although the importance of Ananias and Nabuco may “make it tempting to attribute policy change to the actions of prominent individuals,” as Kingdon (2010, 154) says, structural forces have predominant roles in driving change. Indeed, we see them here in the number of items and agendas that had to emerge together in such a way that a policy entrepreneur and a politician—Nabuco and Ananias—could move a program forward as decision makers in the face of the organized anarchy of the system, the policy primeval soup, and the vagaries of electoral politics. Nabuco and Ananias were able to capitalize on a large number of factors to launch SMASAN. I will show in the next section that this serendipitous convergence supports the MSA model of SMASAN, if only by dint of the difficulties that followed. As we saw in the previous chapter, SMASAN staffers in the mid-2000s felt like the secretariat had arrived at a period of stagnation. From the MSA perspective, as presented by Kingdon (2010, 166), this is unsurprising, as “Policy windows, the opportunities for action on given initiatives, present themselves and stay open for only short periods. . . . The three separate streams [of problems, policies, and politics] come together and are coupled at these times. Participants dump their conceptions of problems, their proposals, and political forces into the choice opportunity, and the outcomes depend on the mix elements present and how the various elements are coupled.” A closing of the policy window around food security may have been what led José, a fourteen-year SMASAN veteran I interviewed in 2006, to offer that he no longer “consider[ed] food security policy to be the priority of the city government.” The remainder of this chapter will examine why and how dynamics shifted later on in SMASAN’s existence to limit its ability to expand on its successes and perhaps truly end, rather than alleviate, hunger in BH.

shifts in the policy process stream in belo horizonte For a city that had absolutely no [food] policy, I believe that we’ve given a good first pass at its management. In the first four years, what we did was implement the policies per se, of the basic programs of the secretariat. . . . After these four years, we had a period of program consolidation, which was under the administration of [Mayor] Célio de Castro, until ’91 [sic]. Now, I think that we can do more, Jahi. I believe that, today, I don’t consider food security policy to be the priority of the city government. Why? Because there are few resources for us, there’s not an investment around our policies. So, now, from ’98 until now, we practically haven’t created a single new

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program. With the exception of the Organic Fair and the present Reference Center [for Food Security], that is still in construction. . . . Two programs in seven, six years. So, I’m thinking that the policies are slowed down. —José, a fourteen-year SMASAN employee

Not too long after my period of intense study of SMASAN began in the mid-2000s, the reelection of PT mayor Fernando Pimentel in 2006 coincided with a low point in the morale of SMASAN functionaries.3 Alongside the corruption and scandals weathered by the PT at the national level that left the local PT-heavy office worried and even disillusioned, Pimentel implemented “organizational reforms” in 2005, whereby appointments, management, staff, and organizational structure were shifted. Where SMASAN had previously been its own free-standing secretariat, it was now shifted to be an adjunct secretariat, organizationally within the Secretariat of Social Policy. It is unclear what effect this had on SMASAN within the city government. SMASAN functionaries observed that they had been growing apart from the mayor, and so were unable to get their concerns aired. On the other hand, at least one informant felt the new positioning had improved SMASAN’s situation, as it lessened the “political” load of the office. In the informant’s view, secretaries must act as much like politicians as administrators, whereas the undersecretary could nominally be more focused on SMASAN’s core missions and less on political battles within the mayor’s cabinet. Be that as it may, the reforms exacerbated SMASAN staffers’ concerns about the fate of SMASAN, or at least those of the cohort I interviewed. Many expressed the view that Mayor Pimentel was looking to consolidate the popular programs, such as Popular Restaurants, and to some extent to place political friends and supporters in SMASAN positions, while getting rid of squeaky wheels and employees without political connections (interview 682–05, dated March 6, 2006; interview 602A-10, dated April 4, 2005; participant observations March 3, 2004, April 4, 2005, and March 6, 2006). Indeed, insofar as Pimentel’s reelection campaign mentioned SMASAN, it seemed primarily to mention only the Popular Restaurants program, as well as underestimate the number of people the program served. Another interpretation is that Pimentel, an economist and former municipal finance secretary, was preoccupied with the large budget deficits left by his predecessors and with bringing BH closer to solvency (City Mayors 2005; FernandoPimentel.com 2004/2007). This latter position appears supported by a participant observation made in April 2005.

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During a discussion of the politicization of SMASAN, several functionaries proposed the idea that Pimentel was perhaps simply unfamiliar with the details of the secretariat and therefore making uninformed changes. One reportedly had a contact at the Municipal Secretariat of the Treasury who had shared various bits of information with them. Their contact’s view was that there were reforms taking place in all of the secretariats. From the contact’s point of view in the Treasury, as relayed by the SMASAN functionary, the reforms in other secretariats were even more blatantly political, turning the city into a political machine to support Pimentel. However, this secondhand information must be interpreted cautiously, and the reorganization of SMASAN may differ across points of perspective, an idea to which we will return shortly. Regardless of the cause, however, the reforms, tight financial situation, sense of ulterior political motives, and lack of personal political capital invested in SMASAN by Pimentel worried the department’s workers. In short, in 2005 there was a feeling of stagnation, somewhat reversed in the years to follow. That sense of the situation, however, remained in the air and was vividly reflected in a participant observation in 2007. I asked Eliane then how the energy level in the office seemed. She replied that people seemed to be behaving like “the living dead.” Jairo offered a similar picture. When asked what he saw as the primary objectives of SMASAN, he replied, “Now, I think we’re in a period of stability. So, we need to search for new fronts to work on. . . . We need new programs, to do things differently now.” As touched on above, of the twenty-seven distinct programs listed in former SMASAN staffer Moises Machado’s 2003 summary of SMASAN, 89% (twenty-four programs) were created in 1996 or before, during the administration of Mayor Patrus Ananias. This seems consistent with an evaluation by Eliane: “I think that there are already some points where the secretariat has already excelled quite a bit, like, for example, the Popular Restaurant. So, I think that the mayor thinks like this: ‘The Popular Restaurant is working out, I don’t really need to mess with anything else, you know?’” Aside from concerns about solvency, it seems easy to conclude that Mayor Pimentel, two political “generations” removed from its creation and having little personal stake in SMASAN, did not fully share an appreciation of its innovation or the achievement it represented. Pimentel had engaged in a number of infrastructure projects in BH, leading José to comment, “The evaluation we have is that there’s money [for SMASAN], but, presently, the city’s priority, the municipal government’s priority is investment in public works, in roads, not in social

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politics. In infrastructure politics.” Highly visible infrastructure can be characterized as a populist attempt to make “the difference” to which an administration can point. Pimentel went on to be elected governor of the state of Minas Gerais in 2014. Sometime after my interview with José, I tried to ascertain the municipal shift for myself. I attended a seminar then mayor Pimentel gave at the University of Michigan in April 2008. He presented on his administration’s work on the Vila Viva, Transforming Favelas into Neighborhoods program. According to Pimentel, the reconstruction plan he was spearheading at the time was the second-largest urban renovation/ renewal project in South America. It had advanced past the favela/ aglomerado “regularization” then ongoing in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil and one of the largest cities in the world. This all seemed to be coinciding with what seemed a lack of consciousness about food security and the internationally famous secretariat in his own administration. From a short conversation with the mayor after his presentation, my impressions converged upon those of his employees in SMASAN—that he was not familiar with food security in its full conception, even insofar as it was seen by his office. When questioned about plans and directions for SMASAN and food security in BH, the mayor’s responses dealt with maintaining and expanding present programs, such as Popular Restaurants and School Meals, and continuing educational efforts within the municipal schools to teach proper nutrition and the right to food. However, none of the huge repository of new ideas and directions I had seen represented within SMASAN—resources for more expansive educational materials, the Food Security Reference Center, further engaging and expanding local farmer participation, reigning in and reforming organic markets—seemed on the agenda. Not only did he not mention any of these during our albeit brief conversation, but he indicated no awareness of alternatives beyond expansion of the programs already in place. Of course, I later realized my interpretation and that of the SMASAN functionaries were based on our personal connections to the programs— as an attentive researcher and as employees, respectively. Additionally our expectations were expressly centered in the rationalistic institutional models Kingdon and the MSA sought to refute on both theoretical and empirical grounds. That is, we perceived problems still outstanding and wondered why they were not being addressed by the mayor. The MSA instructs its practitioners to consider not just problems and solutions, but all three of the streams interpenetrating together—problems, policies, and politics—within the context of an organized anarchy.

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So the problem at hand appears from our perspective a dearth of necessary resources from the mayor’s office. In short, food security had been vastly improved in BH, but the sense SMASAN staffers and I shared is that a number of aspects of food security still needed serious attention. Bettering services for the very poorest with little-to-no purchasing power, directly supporting community building and leadership development around food security, supporting urban gardening, increasing contact and recruitment for the Straight from the Countryside program, and enacting measures to directly support biodiversity conservation insofar as BH’s administration can influence the farmers through its programs are just a few potential directions. All staff and farmers I interviewed repeated concerns or complaints that more resources were needed for education and information dissemination. But once we revisit the MSA, starting with indicators of a problem, we find with Kingdon, for example, such markers “[were] not used primarily to determine whether or not a given problem exists; such determination is a matter of interpretation” (2010, 91). Rather, decision makers use indicators to assess the magnitude of a problem and to become aware of changes in the problem. If, as it would appear, SMASAN has been successful in reducing the magnitude of the problems of food security in BH, “a steady state is viewed as less problematic than changing figures” (Kingdon 2010, 91). Even more inhibiting to further action, the figures on food insecurity are changing for the positive in BH. And world acclaim has followed for fifteen years. SMASAN’s programs are considered inspirations for those in other cities, and its founding mayor was rewarded with a national position as the minister for combating hunger and placed in charge of the national Zero Hunger program. BH was and is meeting and surpassing the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals in infant mortality (OMBH 2014). Such results, while welcome, also meant that SMASAN’s work and its proposals for expansion and new policy solutions were taking place in the context of a problem stream without the previous urgency motivating action. Kingdon describes the failure associated with such success this way: A corollary of addressing a problem is that growth inevitably levels off. Failure to solve or even address a problem, as well as success, may result in its demise as a prominent agenda item. It takes time, effort, mobilization of many actors, and the expenditure of political resources to keep an item prominent on the agenda. . . . A subject gets attention when it is novel. When it is no longer novel, people’s attention may turn away from the subject even though it may still be valid or important. . . . Said one respondent . . . “The

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world of ideas is like the world of fashion. Ideas . . . burn themselves out in a burst of growth and others take their place.” (2010, 104–5)

It can be argued that Mayor Pimentel was moving on to guarantees of other human rights. Based on our understanding of how food security is in fact tied up in the realization of other rights, such a shift could still be seen as a positive for food security, even if he was not choosing to focus his political capital on the right to food per se. To wit, in terms of problems, favelas, originally illegal shantytowns and still areas of much irregular development, poverty, and crime, are certainly an obvious problem, and in such a way that the MSA would support action to address these very characteristics. The Vila Viva program and housing issues, arguably Pimentel’s chief focus at that time, were, after all, also crisis driven. Crisis, as touched on, in itself is an enabler for action within the MSA. Attention to urban architecture in the favelas contains measures to address the dangers of mudslides and rapid erosion, which caused significant property damage and a number of deaths in BH (BBC News 2003; Vieira 2008). Vila Viva and other projects also address improved sanitation, a Millennium Development Goal and a human right expressed directly by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in their calls for an adequate standard of living, housing, and reduction of infant mortality. In point of fact, Lampreia (1995) found that the level of infant mortality doubled from approximately 50 to 100 deaths per 1,000 live births among families earning the same wages—one-half of one minimum wage—if they lacked basic water and sanitation services. On the other hand, attempts to “fix” slums are always in danger of purposefully or inadvertently gentrifying areas (Davis 2006). Agency, as always, remains a key struggle. In terms of public opinion and popular support, Pimentel’s infrastructure projects featured prominently in his City Mayors (2005) biography as a finalist for World’s Best Mayor: Under the model Participating [sic] Budget, the various communities decide on the investments to be made by the regional public authorities. In the Habitation Participating Budget, unique in Brazil, district policies are directly defined by the people. In the past 13 years, under this budget, some 1,000 public works have been implemented costing around US$170 million. Under the Habitation Participating Budget, some 2,479 houses have been built for the poor at a cost of US$21 million. And some US$9 [sic] has been allocated for the construction of more than 1,800 houses over the next few years.

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The participatory budget, a much-noted system used by some cities in Brazil, allows citizens to directly determine how to spend some part of the overall city budget (Baiocchi et al. 2011). As such, Pimentel’s projects doubly fit into the public’s mood at the time, corresponding to the MSA factor of the “national mood.” The projects, then, are to a degree determined directly by the people themselves, and the scale of these projects when paired with sanitation and efforts to clean local water sources, supposedly, benefited nearly 50% of the city population (City Mayors 2005). The political calculus does not seem difficult, though the details and outcomes of these projects, which are beyond the scope of the present work, remain to be cataloged. The extent of federal support for the infrastructure projects certainly enabled Pimentel’s attention to Vila Viva. The contracts for the work are locked in a way that “even if reelection changes the administration, the contracts MUST be completed, even if the FEDERAL government changes” (presentation by Mayor Fernando Pimentel, April 4, 2008). In contrast, SMASAN was already making significant use of federal funding and other sources to defray the costs of its programs. That SMASAN occupies only 1–2% of the city’s budget may be acting as much as an inhibitor to its political fortunes as a benefit. As Rocha (2016a) has more recently explored, it is not hard to imagine that a city leader concerned with balancing budgets would refuse to seek to expand the share of a highly effective array of city programs that presently accounts for little of the city budget as increases are already needed to maintain even a baseline of services. That is, Pimentel did oversee the expansion of some SMASAN programs, including the Popular Restaurant program, for which additional facilities were built, with still more built in the years that followed, even while the amount of money required to subsidize the individual meal price at the restaurants increased every year (Nabuco and Souki 2004; PMBH 2010). Thus, it would be understandable if he did not look to further increase costs, a point highlighted by Nabuco and Souki. In fact, Nabuco and Souki state that neither the originating administration of Ananias nor the subsequent administration of Célio de Castro substantially increased the SMASAN budget above its original size during their administrations. The secretariat’s share has never surpassed 2% of the city budget, and actually decreased in nominal as well as real value between 2001 and 2003. It is particularly unsurprising, then, that the resources for SMASAN did not significantly increase under Pimentel, and, it so happens, have not significantly increased following his tenure.

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Such an increase would be unprecedented, reinforcing the idea that budget constraints are inhibiting actions in the problems stream of present-day food security. In the policies stream, on the other hand, the array of potential policies in housing and urban renewal are significantly beyond the scope of the present work, but it must be noted that Federal Law 10.257, passed in 2001, specifically pledges to support urban planning of the type Vila Viva’s regularization of the favelas envisioned (Fernandes 2001). Further, improved housing and living standards are also old and venerable demands out of a stratified Brazilian society, with movements and policy proposals going back at least into the ’60s and ’70s, if not earlier (Doimo 1995). Additionally, although we will skirt the political state of the community centered on housing policy in BH and Brazil more generally, there has been a fragmentation within the food policy community. Ironically, by helping to increase the number of food security specialists, SMASAN perhaps increased the possibility of policy fragmentation and its inhibitory effects. Whether it is because of what progress was made on consensus, the low-hanging fruit of food security, or reasons otherwise, the staff within SMASAN now have many different ideas about priorities and the direction of SMASAN’s future. It is now more difficult for a prospective policy entrepreneur to advance SMASAN’s agenda. SMASAN lost status within the city administrative structure as an adjunct secretariat under the Secretariat of Social Policy rather than a secretariat in and of itself. Action appeared to be further stifled by the replacement of the innovative Maria Regina Nabuco with Rogério Colombini, a politician from a rival party (Republican Party of Brazil, Partido Republicano do Brasil) with a background in business administration and sociology. As we concluded in a section above, Nabuco was almost certainly a policy entrepreneur for SMASAN. Colombini may have had similar potential, but unlike Nabuco he did not come from a career focused on studying food security. Further, his management style, according to participant observation and interviews, did not match Nabuco’s in quality or in generating creativity and consensus. During participant observation on April 19, 2006, another SMASAN functionary, Mangabeira, complained about Colombini’s management style and abilities in comparison to those of Nabuco. She remarked that Regina Nabuco knew the staff’s names. Another interviewee, José, snorted, saying that Nabuco knew all of their names, and in fact had a pretty good bead on everything that was going on in SMASAN. Further reminiscing

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about Nabuco, who died in 2004, boiled down to her apparent grasp and understanding of everyone’s name, work, and function, and how each tied into the SMASAN mission at large. The tone in the room implied that this kind of integration in organizational cognition, facilitated by a secretary who could line up all of the disparate parts of SMASAN, had not happened since. The administrative gaps appeared replicated at a general level. Newspapers from my trip there in 2004 reported that the municipal administration contained twenty-six or more secretariats, depending how you counted them. Pimentel himself could not give a number. This may have been true under Ananias and de Castro as well, but as the creator of SMASAN, Ananias is certain to have had a closer relationship to it, giving the bureau and its policies more prominence among other secretariats than had been the case under Pimentel. In any case, in my participant observation in 2006, Mangabeira and José agreed that Nabuco listened, encouraged creativity, incorporated ideas from everyone into the secretariat’s actions, and held regular meetings. In Jairo’s interview, he said that he “didn’t even know what [his] neighbor” at SMASAN was doing—what kind of project he worked on or had in mind. In the mid-2000s, under Colombini, there were no regular meetings between the various managers in order to integrate their work, and under Jairo’s boss, his section did not even meet so that he wasn’t really sure of all that was going on even in just his section of SMASAN: “If this is happening in my own section, can you imagine what it’s like in the secretariat [as a whole]?” So whereas the newly created SMASAN was able to depend on motivated entrepreneurs in Nabuco and Ananias, as well as unified and openly developed policy, it appears that Colombini did not support such a paradigm. As for Pimentel, it is quite possible, if not likely, that he was a policy entrepreneur—just not one within SMASAN and the area of food security. Political agendas are always ripe for change upon a change in administration. SMASAN experienced two changes in administration over the course of my original research—from Ananias to Castro, then Castro to Pimentel—as well as a less pronounced change when Pimentel was reelected in his own right and no longer limited to a “caretaker” administration maintaining the status quo. Within SMASAN, the secretary’s position shifted from originator Maria Regina Nabuco to Rogério Colombini, a politician from another party who eventually ran unsuc-

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cessfully for a congressional seat before becoming the state president of a rival party. In his interview, Jairo accused Colombini of only paying attention to projects that might bring the politician personal attention or political capital, to the neglect of programs that may not have been as publicly well known but possibly as or even more important. In terms of pressure groups outside of the government, it is unclear in the context of the present study what the exact mechanics of the political shifts were within groups concerned with housing and quality of life in favelas. There are assuredly such groups, including the inheritors of Betinho’s Citizen Action Movement and a number of other groups that were or are organized around such causes. Additionally, attention to infrastructure and housing was clearly good for Pimentel. He was nominated for World’s Best Mayor in 2005 in part because of his burgeoning Vila Viva program. He was one of the founders of the PT, had a history as a militant protester during the dictatorship, and is a native of BH. Back in 2008, I speculated that the future might bring articles on “Pimentel’s amazing progress in housing” and sanitation, with questions raised as to why the mayor in 2018 was not paying attention to housing while working on innovations in food security or a different program entirely. It happens that shifts back have not come to pass. I discuss the current state of play in BH in the final chapter. In the final analysis, the MSA’s model of problems, policies, and politics streams seems to provide a relatively comprehensive picture of both how SMASAN was formed and why SMASAN’s development slowed since its heady first years. In the face of the presumption that such a fundamental and innovative program should be getting all the support it needs, the MSA proved a good model for understanding the actual events as they occurred. That said, does this mean that there is nothing to do but wait five to ten years for the societal wheel to turn back around to food security? Does it mean that a new movement must be built and unified around food security to raise and maintain pressure on the city government? While the answer to these may be a heavily qualified “yes,” in the final chapter we will turn to what appears to have developed in BH since 2009. We will touch upon what the MSA has to say about SMASAN more recently and the U.S. food movement. Finally, drawing on the social science literature around civil society “synergy,” we will look at potential avenues and obstacles to advancing food security policy in BH and in the United States, without waiting for the streams of policy change to turn to another fortuitous alignment.

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conclusions What, then, enabled SMASAN to form and bring its comprehensive approach to the Five A’s to BH, when so many other attempts in the history of Brazil failed to form or to last the nearly twenty-five years SMASAN has? The answers to these questions are, of course, linked. The conditions that allowed SMASAN’s creation were, as we have seen relying heavily on the multiple streams approach (MSA), the interactions across the semi-independent streams of problems, policies, and politics. That is, there were numerous different conditions evolving from many institutions and societal impulses that fostered the agency’s creation. Clearly one key, vis-à-vis the problems stream, is found in the societal and national institutional memory of decades of efforts to address food security nationwide. As an issue, widespread recognition was primed by this history and a reformulation of the problem that redefined not just what the problem of food insecurity was—inequality and lack of access and agency—but the appropriate ways for the government to address it. That is, seeing the problem as going beyond the Malthusian “there’s not enough food” allowed the PT and Betinho’s Citizens’ Action Movement Against Hunger and Poverty and for Life to develop a definition of the problem calling for actions that improved the rights of citizens and changed structures of inequality rather than relying upon emergency-oriented or assistentialist welfare programs. The backgrounds of BH mayor Ananias and SMASAN secretary Nabuco prepared them to focus on the problem from this perspective and to place food insecurity at the top of their agendas. Conversely, the movements of the problems stream eventually acted against the institutional sustainability of SMASAN. Positive comparisons to earlier conditions can be seen as a significant part of the difficulties in maintaining organizationally progressive approaches. As problems are addressed and decline in impact, the pressure to keep addressing them diminishes. In examining its founding documents and interviewing the people who work there, we discover evidence that SMASAN’s objective is to address, in effect, the Five A’s. Yet there is still much to be done to accomplish this broader objective. According to the MSA, in halving some of the problems in BH in relation to food security—infant mortality and malnutrition—and changing the structure of accessibility with visible and popular programs such as School Meals, Popular Restaurants, and the ABCs, the likelihood that SMASAN’s items reach (or remain at) the top of the city’s administrative agenda declines. The

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dynamic actually raises a startling question: Should food security be kept at the top of the agenda? And if so, how, as indicators improve but remain problematic? Problems remain in BH. Comprehensive coverage for the very poorest citizens who cannot afford the minimal costs of the food security programs, such as the ABCs and now moribund Workers’ Convoy, is still needed. The evidence implies that SMASAN and the local community lack the resources to fully implement the assistentialist programs, such as Big Popular Basket, or the “self-assistance” programs such as Urban Gardens. Do the decreases in infant mortality and malnutrition, important successes to be sure, mean that city decision makers can move the remaining problems down in priority? Housing, education, employment, poverty, and inequality are all problems as arguably urgent in BH at the moment. Was Pimentel’s work on the housing/urban renovation projects of Vila Viva, supposedly one of the largest projects of its kind in South America if not the world, legitimately more important? Is this a matter of a false dichotomy? Many other priorities are bound up with agency and food security more broadly. Though SMASAN’s foundation rests on the idea that food security is multisectoral, that does not mean that working on food security automatically addresses all other sectors, or that other sectors will not at times need more attention than food security. Whereas some answer will by definition be arrived at via the semianarchic process I’ve outlined here, only discussion among experts, the public, and politicians meeting the standards of both substantive democracy and substantive citizenship will determine the end results of such a process. No workable answer will be so conceptually simple as a popular vote or a consensus of technocrats. That said, neither are answers random. They are definitively affected by democratic institutions. The policies stream in BH, and Brazil more generally, was for years composed of innovations, trial balloons, and uncoordinated and sometimes incoherent attempts at addressing food security. From this “policy primeval soup” came a flurry of ideas that had survived years of selection and recombination. When a policy window opened, ideas were suddenly enacted in a several-year flurry that has since tapered off. This period of apparently rapid and dramatic change could be seen to challenge commonly held beliefs among experts and laypeople about the speed and magnitude of change. Kingdon (2010, 82) found no reason to favor incrementalism across seventy-five policy subjects in health care and transportation regulation in the United States: “It might be fair to describe some changes as incremental, but not all or even a majority of

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them.” Political science since his pioneering 1984 work agrees (Cairney and Heikkila 2014). The evidence reviewed here on the history of food security policy in Brazil implies that although food security policy saw fast change in a short period followed by relative stasis, such change need not be dichotomous in its expression in this or any other context. Multiple states may be arrived at, at different times. Another factor is important in the policy stream. The policy entrepreneur who takes advantage of a window for (rapid or gradual) change seems to have been present here in the persons of the mayor who created SMASAN, Patrus Ananias de Souza, and the first SMASAN secretary, Dr. Maria Regina Nabuco, two people primed by their life experiences, knowledge, ambitions, and goals to advocate for food security in BH. Indeed, they both helped create the policy window they took advantage of by building consensus across government and the greater society. The pair aided their own cause by bringing the secretariats of education and health into the design process, eventually tapping the logistical and budget resources those secretariats offered. Since the days of Ananias and Nabuco, the evolution of policies continued apace inside BH and beyond, but the implementation of SMASAN policies seems to have been greatly reduced in breadth and pace. The policies presently enacted appear mainly to bolster already popular programs, such as the flagship Popular Restaurant program, which has seen expansions in infrastructure and patronage over the past twenty-five years. Corresponding increases in expenses are likely to absorb resources away from other policies. The appropriateness of such a decision is for the citizens and administration of BH to decide, but in terms of policy priority setting, its visibility and success appeared to have drawn attention to mayors Fernando da Mata Pimentel and Marcio Lacerda (2009–2016). But in contrast to Ananias and Nabuco, Pimentel and Lacerda did not appear primed or inclined toward policy entrepreneurship in the area of food security. They may in fact be policy entrepreneurs, but not in food security. That possibility returns us to the politics stream. It may be frustrating to see a program as innovative as SMASAN struggling with organizational shifts, lack of physical and financial resources, and other difficulties in the course of carrying out its mission to the poorest and wealthiest alike in BH.4 But such a focus may be overlooking other important areas of human rights, as mentioned, that can presently be addressed in the politics stream. That is, the MSA could make one feel, at first reflection, rather discouraged about the possibility of addressing problems and instigating institutional change. If one is not, for example, a mayor, a city

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secretary, or the leader of a mass movement, one is rather less likely to be a policy entrepreneur in the Nabuco-Ananias mold. But the political stream represents the vagaries of human interaction and the pressures of various groups applied upon a society. Although some groups may oppose change as “pseudoadvocates,” it is nonetheless true that genuine advocacy also affects the political stream. The MSA does not prohibit or deny the importance of individual action, but rather offers a model by which those who seek action on their agenda can understand how their efforts may work. The model emphasizes the importance of preparation and patience—developing and monitoring indicators, developing and recombining preexisting policies, political participation, and agitation. The process by which ideas gain and lose credence is in part cyclical rather than entirely random, but is nonetheless also open to the impact of human agency.

chapter 5

Farm, Farmer, and Forest SMASAN and the Environment

As I watched butterflies flit through the fields at Pastorinhas, a farmers’ settlement some thirty-four miles of often uneven, steep, or even nonexistent roads from Belo Horizonte (BH), twenty-three leisurely miles as the butterfly flies, I felt both contentedness and a creeping anxiety.1 As the butterflies and the bees did their thing, flitting from flower to flower, the occasional bird from the number flying overhead would take a break from their lilting cacophony and sweep down among the cultivated rows of greens. As an ecologist, there are all sorts of cants I could place upon their behavior, but it was pleasing to think that their leisurely swoops might just be for the joy of it. Imagine Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood” drifting through the air, as it does at the beginning of nearly every cartoon that begins in an idyllic countryside setting. It was, in short, an agroecologists’ paradise: small-scale farmers growing a diversity of crops alongside threatened rainforest fragments the farmers have committed themselves to defending. Smallholders building connections with local towns and schools to sell their fresh produce direct to consumers. But the hope, joy, and optimism in my heart were at the same time hounded by a familiar voice in my head. Its notes of skepticism were jarringly out of tune with Grieg. This was not simply a scientist’s nuance. Nor was it the albeit important recognition that the farmers’ commitment to their diverse and idyllic farms was paired with precarious livelihoods operating under an unwieldy apparatus of occasionally helpful but also demanding and largely unaccountable political institutions. 132

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No, while the challenges of making systems work for farmers, consumers, and the environment were daunting, they were not what I found dispiriting. There was instead a certain dread about the reaction from self-appointed “serious” food system commentators. See, there is the supposed “realism” that reads as assured cynicism on which we touched in the first chapter in the form of “perverse Panglossianism.” Sure, it might be better if we did things a different way, goes the shtick, but good luck with that. I was overtaken by the anticipation that any recounting of the potential of Pastorinhas, and settlements like it, would almost certainly be greeted with doubt and skepticism by any not already convinced of the potential of small-scale, agroecological, and alternative food systems. I fought the unproductive mental paralysis that accompanies the voice of self-styled “objective” researchers who equate scientific rationality only with deconstruction and critique. This nagging feeling is no rhetorical device. As the late systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows pointed out in a classic essay, there is something about contemporary scientific discourse that holds optimism in disregard (Meadows 1996). Doubt and skepticism, two appropriate tools in the scientist’s toolkit, all too often find themselves disproportionately focused on the feasibility of any alternative. Many a scientist doubts the possibility of positive change. This is not to say only critical pessimism is rewarded, but rather that there is too much “science from nowhere,” or perhaps more precisely, science going nowhere (cf. Bové and Dufour 2001; Nagel 1989; Rosen 2010). Since all models and predictions are imperfect, every plan or prediction for the future, positive or negative, can be critiqued. This comes at the cost of a kind of societal stasis for scholarship, with trade-offs similar to those of the “production of innocence” approach of some U.S. journalism (Rosen 2010). An approach in science focused on “reproducing [perceptions of] objectivity” threatens as well to reproduce all the current ills facing us. After all, to paraphrase the seminal ecological economist Herman Daly, true objectivity would not allow us to favor justice over injustice, freedom over slavery, sustainability over depletion, or food security over hunger, for that matter. This is not to say that both rigor and skepticism are not useful to science and critical thinking, but rather, as Meadows (1996, 118) puts it, they ought to be deployed in the service of goals: “If 90% of policy discussion focuses on implementation, virtually all the remaining 10% focuses on modeling and information. That leaves 0% for the last step of policy formation, which should be first—the establishment of clear,

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feasible, socially shared goals. What do we want? Where would we like all these models, this information, this implementation to take us? What is our vision of the world we are trying to create for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren?” Science cannot tell us what kind of world we want for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. It cannot define a vision of a vibrant, sustainable, food-secure, and food-sovereign world, where farmers are adequately compensated and are empowered and passionate about stewarding and conserving surrounding natural habitats. And it cannot speak to whether that vision is desirable. Back in Pastorinhas, these ruminations swirled about as local farmers explained their journey. Starting with hopes to create a self-sufficient lifestyle as a buttress against an unstable economy, they explained how they sought to create and share healthy food for their families and consumers alike. The farmers discussed the challenges they encountered, and continued to encounter, in securing access to their own land. The ongoing challenges led them to reach out to the agrarian reform movements in Brazil, even though the farmers had not started out with plans to get involved. An ambiguous and contentious relationship with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (O Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra, MST), possibly the largest national movement in the world, had led many of them to be cautious and even skeptical of the MST. But they too came to recognize the huge barriers to access to Brazil’s unevenly distributed land. Even with the MST’s help, however, and links to BH’s Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security (SMASAN), many farmers had left Pastorinhas, returning to jobs as laborers in the countryside or city. Many struggled to pay back the value of the land appropriated for their initial settlement, and were unhappy that they were not getting credit or consideration for voluntarily setting aside more land than required for crops in an effort to preserve the local tendrils of the biologically megadiverse Atlantic Forest. And they worried that even if their struggles to maintain their lifestyles were successful, their children saw no future in farming. And given that there was no obvious end to the struggles in farming here, the farmers weren’t sure they could blame their sons and daughters. The status quo, then, did not meet my vision for a sustainable, just, and food sovereign future. To maintain and improve their quality of life while also preserving local habitat and building this seed of an “agroecologists’ paradise,” the farmers would need serious sociopolitical changes to take place. But as geographer Erin Pratley (2012) documents in her doctoral thesis on SMASAN’s Straight from the Countryside program

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(Direto da Roça, DdR), the spaces and avenues for effective political voice for farmers are limited, and barriers of class, political borders, and social perceptions inhibit progress. In short, although both Pratley and I found some benefits for farmers participating in SMASAN’s programs, including for at least two farmers from Pastorinhas, the liberatory, agroecological, and environmental potential of the programs has clearly not been realized. In this chapter, we will examine the dynamics connecting BH’s food security programs, local farmers, and their ecological environment; catalog the effects the programs appear to have had beyond the city limits; interrogate their possibilities; and postulate why they may not have realized their broader potentialities.

context: food, farm, and the environment Agriculture and the demands of food security are two of the foremost drivers of the increasing rate of biodiversity loss. They are also significant contributors to climate change. An estimated 40% of Earth’s nonice-covered land is used for agriculture, and 10–40% of the world’s biodiversity exists wholly outside of protected natural areas (Ferrier et al. 2004). Scientists have increasingly realized that two of the most pressing problems facing us today—rapid biodiversity loss and the food insecurity and malnutrition facing as many as two billion people in the world—are inextricably linked. Their connection is particularly sharp in what came to be called the “land sharing versus land sparing” debate, which addresses direct trade-offs between food produced per unit area and biodiversity (see Fischer et al. 2014; Hill et al. 2015; and Phalan et al. 2016 for more on this debate). In the scientific literature, the debate tends to remain framed by the ideas set out in early work that envisioned the possibility of increasing agricultural production per unit area in order to “spare” more land for strict biodiversity conservation (Balmford, Green, and Scharlemann 2005). Among the issues taken with this approach by those holding the land-sharing position is that it repeatedly conflates the complicated issues of hunger and food security that we have examined throughout this book with agricultural productivity. That is, land-sparing proponents tend to frame food security only in terms of the first tendency that we explored in chapter 2, as productivism, FAD, and neo-productivism. As we discussed, the link between production and food security fails to reflect well-established dynamics in the real world. In fact, it threatens

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greater harm by obscuring the issues of inequality, power, and human rights at the heart of global hunger. Those of us who work from the perspective of land sharing seek to keep those dynamics of food systems in mind. At the same time, we grapple with the potential tensions between biodiversity, agriculture, and food security. Biodiversity and agriculture interplay with each other. Landscape ecologists have solidly established that what happens in the areas surrounding “natural” habitats strongly influences the biodiversity within those habitats. Given agriculture’s extent across Earth and the frequency with which large tracts of land have been fragmented into smaller patches of natural habitat, the areas influencing biodiversity in natural habitats tend to be occupied by the farms and pastures of billions of agriculturalists and pastoralists. Of course, farms and pastures themselves can contain a dizzying array of biodiversity. Land sharing argues that the areas around natural habitats—which ecologists often call “the matrix” (no relation to the movie)—can and should be managed in order to provide both agricultural goods for humans and support for local biodiversity. In practice, this means using the many tools of agroecology. Farmers can grow and rotate multiple kinds of crops, even livestock, on and off the same plot throughout the year. Agroecology aims to minimize or even eliminate the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. It replaces the inputs of today’s “conventional” agriculture with ecological cycles and existing organisms. Trees, nitrogen-fixing plants, and insects that eat pests (pest predators) are useful parts of ecosystems that thrive under agroecology in ways that they do not under “conventional” approaches (Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright 2009). So in this sense, land sharing means sharing the purposes of agricultural production and supporting biodiversity (and other elements of healthy ecosystems). But there is a second meaning to land sharing that is too often lost in academic analyses. Land sharing entails not just “shared uses” of the same land, but also shared governance, voice, and priorities with other actors in the food system, particularly farmers. This is part of the reason that agroecology is typically central to land sharing. Agroecology is now commonly referred to as a scientific field, a movement, and a practice, and draws on the thousands of years of practical experience of the world’s farmers alongside the insights and methods of modern agronomic and ecological research (Sevilla Guzmán and Woodgate 2013). We risk perpetuating injustice, inequality, and insecurity when we fail to recognize the struggles farmers face and the

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rights they deserve, particularly the 84% of the farmers who farm on less than two hectares (Lowder, Skoet, and Raney 2016). It is through this nexus that the “social movement” element of agroecology enters. According to many agroecologists, without social movements around the rights and representation of farmers, and citizens more broadly, agroecology would be both ineffective and unjust. The debate over land sparing or land sharing is ongoing and unresolved in academic terms. But in some places the argument is made moot on the ground. Some farmers, like those in Pastorinhas, engage in protection and preservation of natural habitats by choice. Some farmers appear willing to give up some degree of profits in order to achieve environmental stewardship (e.g., Chouinard et al. 2008). The prospects for what sociologist Hannah Wittman (2009, 2010) has called “ecological land reform” and “agrarian citizenship” seem worth considering. Agrarian citizenship is built on “political participation, local food production, and environmental stewardship,” and “redefine[s] the ongoing . . . relationship between land, state, and rural society . . . rural activists such as the MST envision the redistribution of land as a material right, but also view the transformation of the land-society relation as an equally public responsibility” (Wittman 2009, 120). To these concepts, I’ll add that existing research links farmers’ adoption of agroecological practices with socioeconomic resources, well-being, and their surrounding social cues (Baumgart-Getz, Prokopy, and Floress 2012; Marshall 2009). As the main facts around food security are stark— globally, and often locally, human populations produce enough food, and inequality in power and resources are the main causes of hunger—it seems that the potential for improving agriculture’s “friendliness to biodiversity” without expanding its land base is a vision worth putting our science in the service of. With this objective in mind, we will continue with our examination of SMASAN’s connections with local farmers, their livelihoods and well-being, biodiversity in the natural habitats around them, and the potential for, and barriers to, SMASAN’s efforts to support agrarian citizenship.

straight from the countryside (ddr) DdR is one of SMASAN’s flagship initiatives. As we discussed in chapter 3, the program provides selected small, local family farmers with low-cost access to produce stand locations in high-traffic areas of BH.

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Family farms are legally defined in Brazil as small farms (1) up to four times the official regional estimate of the minimum economically viable farm size; that (2) predominantly use family labor; with (3) most of the household income originating from the family farm; and that (4) are managed by family members. Erin Pratley (2012, 133–34) reports the percentage of income from farming required for program selection is pinned at 80%, and the maximum size for the state of Minas Gerais as 80 ha. Although during the period I first studied the program (2004– 2007), all participating farms sized at less than 50 ha, with most less than 10 ha. In recruiting for DdR, SMASAN works with local governments and extension agents to solicit interested farmers. Farmers responding are informed about the quality and safety standards required by the program: basic practices in safe and proper storage, handling, sanitation, and use of agricultural chemicals. A series of visits are arranged for the state extension agent assigned to SMASAN to inspect farms for compliance. According to city officials, although established partnerships nominally take precedence during selection, in practice there are more than enough spaces to accommodate qualifying farmers. Some farmers contended, however, that spaces appeared to be limited in practice; this may arise from a difference between SMASAN and some farmers on what counts as “qualifying.” In fact, interviews indicated that the barriers to larger numbers of participants were primarily insufficient notice about the programs, a gap on which nearly every farmer remarked; challenges for farmers in meeting the basic standards of the programs; and arranging transportation and staffing for produce stands. The latter demands appear to impose additional costs and labor, although farmers are encouraged to join cooperatives so that they can share these. Once a part of DdR, farmers are visited by SMASAN’s extension agents at least once a year as a condition of the program, to confirm continued compliance with SMASAN’s standards for quality and safety. While SMASAN cannot ban the use of synthetic pesticides, for instance, use of what the extensionist deems an excessive amount is not permitted. The program is designed to allow farmers and urban consumers to share the economic benefits of avoiding intermediary sellers, who in my interviews farmers and city officials consistently reported as charging up to a 100% markup. Situated in the threatened, megadiverse, and heavily fragmented Atlantic Forest that once occupied much of southeastern Brazil, participating local farmers are, in turn, in a position to preserve local biodiversity. Like the many area farmers who sell to intermediary

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produce retailers, CEASA-MG (Minas Gerais state’s semigovernmental market hub), local restaurants, and various government purchase programs, DdR connects food security in BH to the condition of the region’s agricultural matrix and rainforest fragments. How this relationship affects biodiversity depends on farmers’ practices. These, in the meantime, depend on the effects of various support mechanisms, social relationships, and connections to local ecologies. These connections, as much made in participants’ minds as in BH’s pragmatic programs, offer an interesting contrast to much of the existing literature on food, agriculture, and biodiversity. Much of this work asks how biodiversity can benefit food and agriculture, usually through the prism of ecosystem services (e.g., Kremen and Miles 2012), but the connections examined here show the potential for increased food security (via SMASAN) to benefit biodiversity (via social and economic influences on farmer practices). SMASAN specifically looks to support small family farms for a number of reasons. For one, Brazil has seen a dramatic in-migration of rural residents into cities in the past several decades, from two-thirds rural to 80% urban in a short amount of time (IBGE 2006). Migration has been linked to uncontrolled expansion of cities, including expansion of the aforementioned favelas and increased strain on city services. There also seems to be a larger cultural imperative in Brazil for supporting small farms, in part out of a desire to preserve the social and cultural heritage they represent, foster a competitive marketplace, and address centuries of inequality and exploitation of rural workers and small farmers (Wright and Wolford 2003).2 According to an array of metrics, the focus on small family farmers in Brazil is justified. Brazil has one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world: 2% of landowners own 55.5% of agricultural land and the top 0.3% (15,012 landowners) own 30% of agricultural land—nearly 100 million ha (IBGE 2009, 176). Brazilian sociologist José de Souza Martins has pointed out that Brazil has failed to surmount a classic “historical impasse,” whereas many countries have chosen either to maintain a highly unequal and inefficient regime of concentrated land and wealth or to engage in the sort of redistributive agrarian reform that provides improved opportunities in employment, supports internal markets, and aids higher productivity of small farms (Souza Martins 1999). The latter condition is no typo. Decades of mainstream research have consistently found that smaller farms are more productive per unit area than larger ones (Barrett, Bellemare, and Hou 2010; Lipton 2009).

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The ethos supporting small farms represents the interplay of a number of different values, including echoes of work in the mid-twentieth century by anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt (1947, 1978) on agricultural regions of the United States. The “Goldschmidt Hypothesis” offers that community welfare will be significantly higher in regions where agriculture is organized around smaller-scale farms than in regions dominated by a small number of large farms. This work has largely stood up in the sixty years since Goldschmidt’s original study, with a number of sociological studies reexamining his work and showing “at least tentative support for his conclusions” (Lyson, Torres, and Welsh 2001). BH is surrounded by agricultural communities, though the area is rapidly urbanizing and seeing an increase in mining operations. Most farmers in the region typically sell to CEASA or large retailers, as they often have neither the means to travel to the city and sell their produce themselves nor the means to rent the space and a stall from which to sell. Whereas retailers or other intermediaries often absorb the majority of profits from the sale of the products, the competition among small farmers allows retailers to dictate low prices on the supply side (Nabuco and Souki 2004; Araújo and Alessio 2005). SMASAN has supported its own efforts at supplying low-income urban consumers with food at lower prices by connecting small producers with consumers through DdR, with the city helping organize market space and charging farmers a small fee (R$15.15 in 2005). In coordination with EMATER-MG (Empresa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural–Minas Gerais, Public Enterprise for Technical Assistance and Rural Extension of Minas Gerais), SMASAN solicits and supports small family farmers so that they can come to the city to directly sell their products. Although the program requires farmers to sell their goods at a fixed price to improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables to low-income populations, that there are no intermediaries means that farmers should still take home more money than otherwise. Consumers meanwhile can buy produce this way at lower prices, increasing food accessibility. The local farmer-consumer connection is all the more significant considering increasing concentration on export agriculture and globalized production around the world, with negative impacts often falling disproportionately on small farmers (van der Ploeg 2008). Lower prices from global surpluses have decreased many small farmers’ economic power as well as their own food security. Depressed prices permit corporate interests to pit small farmers around the world against each other. And even as farmers often face lower prices, consumers often see

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no change, or even price increases, as concentrated industrial sectors absorb the difference. By removing intermediaries and redistributing the retailers’ markups to consumers, SMASAN’s efforts to localize the food system of a large city defy current trends. That said, there remain barriers and lacunae in SMASAN’s support of agricultural producers, to which we will return at the end of this chapter.

bh-area farms, farmers, and forests The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is economically dependent on ore mining, a sector that expanded over the past two decades, both statewide and in the greater BH landscape (IBGE 2013; author’s interviews). BH is surrounded by a heavily fragmented landscape within the “megabiodiverse” Mata Atlântica–Cerrado (Atlantic Forest–Brazilian Savannah) transition zone (see figure 6). According to the 2006 Brazilian census, there were approximately 323,000 farms on 4,272,000 ha in Minas growing temporary crops—crops grown and harvested within the course of one year (IBGE 2006). That averages out to 13 ha per farm, though given the high degree of inequality across landowners in Brazil, it is fairly certain that the distribution of land is highly skewed. Median per capita income in rural areas of Southeastern Brazil, where Minas Gerais is located, fell between one-half and one minimum wage in 2004 (IBGE 2006).3 Farmer interviews indicated that low prices offered for their products, especially by intermediary sellers; expanding urban borders/suburbanization; mining; and labor shortages represented the largest threats to their occupational survival. The replies corresponded to interviews my colleagues and I conducted during research on another project in 2012 that looked at the effects of the Zero Hunger PAA (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos da Agricultura Familiar, Family Farm Food Purchase Program) on farmers and deforestation (Oldekop et al. 2015).4 In the rural, though increasingly suburban, landscape around BH, agricultural production is almost exclusively horticultural, focusing particularly on leafy vegetables. Most farmers in the region appear to produce almost exclusively for commercial sale rather than for subsistence, and based on my observations and conversations with farmers and other residents, livestock and production of other cash crops at any significant scale are uncommon. For the work this book is based on, my field assistants and I interviewed thirteen farmers. Most of the farms were located within 40 km

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figure 6. Location of Minas Gerais and Belo Horizonte within the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest transition zone. Reprinted with permission from Oldekop et al. (2015). Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and International Society for Plant Pathology, 2015.

and south of BH (the general landscape is pictured in figure 7). The thirteen farms represented approximately 8% of farming households in the area, according to Brazilian census data. And based on data provided by SMASAN, the farmers interviewed represent approximately 16% of the farmers in DdR in 2005. SMASAN farmers were solicited from a list of twenty farmers who had been participants of DdR the previous year. After getting zero positive responses to requests for participation, we followed up a suggestion by SMASAN and conducted unannounced site visits. To my surprise, the tactic proved to be preferred by many of the farmers, with far more positive results than attempts to schedule appointments at their produce stands or by phone. We made it clear their participation was strictly voluntary and their identities would be kept confidential. The farmers proved welcoming and appeared comfortable speaking to us.5 Many of them talked with

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Sabará Contagem

Belo Horizonte

Betim Nova Lima Ibirité

Google Earth © 2016 Google Image © 2016 DigitalGlobe Image © 2016 CNES/Astrium

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figure 7. Major urban areas and land cover south of Belo Horizonte.

us for a half hour, and in some cases voluntarily continued for over an hour. Only three SMASAN farmers, one of whom owned two sites, were formally interviewed. Three additional SMASAN farmers declined. Brief and informal conversations with SMASAN farmers took place at farmers’ markets and visits to local farms during visits to Brazil throughout the 2003–2010 period. Using snowball sampling—asking SMASAN interviewees for suggestions of neighboring or local farmers with similar backgrounds and farm production—a total of ten non-SMASAN farmers were interviewed (with two additional farmers declining). One SMASAN-affiliated farm was certified organic. One non-SMASAN farm was experimenting with organic methods for health reasons according to family members we interviewed. Members of this latter farm envisioned a transition to organic certification. All other surveyed farms had no formal designation or certification as “organic” or related labels, and indeed seemed to base their farm practices on family background, personal ideals, and individual perceptions of market conditions—what they thought consumers wanted and were willing to pay. Most of the thirteen farmers voiced some sort of positive “ecological” viewpoint, and differences across farmers did not break cleanly between SMASAN and non-SMASAN.

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Social characteristics across SMASAN and non-SMASAN farmers were broadly similar. All were small family farmers—meaning that at least 80% of their income came from farming or forestry-related activities, that labor is primarily family provided, and that total property size was not greater than 30 ha. All of the farms visited grew primarily vegetables, mostly lettuce varieties, though some grew other various vegetables, including spinach, broccoli, endives, arugula, beets, and carrots. With regards to the local ecology, the Atlantic Forest is described as 90% deforested (e.g., Dean 1995). By virtue of its denuding—primarily for mining and agriculture—the Atlantic Forest receives less attention than many other more intact, and therefore “charismatic,” landscapes, despite the stunningly high level of biodiversity that the forest still hosts. Indeed, during an extended visit, my colleague ecologist John Vandermeer hypothesized that the 90% figure may be an overestimate as very small but ecologically significant fragments are often overlooked (e.g., Decocq et al. 2016). Setting aside the details, a significant focus of Vandermeer’s work has addressed how to construct fragmented landscapes so that they can still support high biodiversity based, as we discussed earlier in the chapter, on the quality of the matrix. Clearly farmers play a major role in creating such landscapes. Farms that are “high-quality” matrices can support a very significant portion of the world’s biodiversity that would otherwise be lost if we focused solely on the (still vitally important) unfragmented natural reserves of the world.6 Further, as ecologists Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer point out in their book with environmental historian Angus Wright (2009), the biodiversity within large natural reserves would be inadequately protected without attention to the matrix and fragments outside of them, which support organisms in natural habitats in numerous direct and indirect ways. Importantly for this approach, the Brazilian Forest Code requires landowners to keep part of their land preserved for the Atlantic Forest.7 Within the farms we studied, there were no forest fragments at two locations. It is possible that the forest in those sites had been cleared several decades earlier, before the law was passed. The total farm area of the thirteen farmers ranged from 0.01 to 30 ha, with most—eight—under 15 ha. The proportion of area under production varied from 24% to 90%.8 Fragments of the Atlantic Forest on farmers’ properties can be generally characterized as established secondary, closed-canopy forest. That is, these are forests that had substantially regrown after deforestation for timber, by fire, or from other significant disturbances. Gaps in the forest canopy where sunlight penetrates were relatively rare in the

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interior of the fragments. Primary (old-growth) fragments also exist, scattered here and there throughout the central Minas Gerais, with several private and state nature reserves present in the region as well. In addition to interviewing the farmers, we sampled the ant biodiversity at seven sites on six farms: three SMASAN partners and three nonpartners. Ants are a classic indicator species, with a long history of being used in initial assessments of diversity across agroecological matrices and for documenting differences between farm management systems (e.g., Agosti et al. 2000; Leslie et al. 2007). The diversity of ant species, which play a variety of ecological roles, can show strong correlations with the diversity of other species (Armbrecht, Perfecto, and Vandermeer 2004). Lastly, ants are useful because they are ubiquitous, extremely diverse, and highly studied, and their sensitivity to environmental changes can help indicate ecosystem health (Alonso and Agosti 2000). By using ants as an indicator, we were attempting to assess whether there were any preliminary indications that SMASAN programs were having effects on biodiversity in the Forest-Cerrado transition region around BH. I will discuss the results in brief later in this chapter, as they link to larger ideas of connecting food security and biodiversity conservation. For our full analysis, see Chappell, Moore, and Heckelman (2016).

the economic effects of smasan’s farm partnerships In the case of the producers, they gave incentives to people to produce, because we only plant when we already know where we’re going to sell. . . . And we’re more motivated because we don’t lose our goods, and our real problem here was such losses. Sometimes, with your produce just after you harvested it, you don’t find a buyer, and then you’ve lost it all. Or [sell it] cheap, but there are times that you can’t even manage to sell it cheap, so then it’s lost. And now with this program, no, we plant knowing that we’re going to sell. So, one keeps planting. Because if there wasn’t this incentive—Even so, I know various producers here that have stopped planting because they don’t have [a place] to sell, so they stop, they go to the city. —SMASAN partner farmer Marquinho, March 16, 2005

Budget information was difficult to obtain, with several farmers simply replying, “I don’t know” or “I couldn’t really say right now” as to how much they spend on inputs and in expenses each month or their monthly income. Although there are any number of possible reasons for this, Lucas Carneiro (2004) offers that most producers are made uncomfortable by

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the topic of income and expenses, suggesting that for the most part such finances are filled with bureaucracy and too complicated for their comprehension. According to Carneiro, “It’s rare to encounter producers that, at least, have a notion of the cost of their activities.” More commonly, rather, one finds producers only temporarily or intermittently tracking their ledgers. Although there is insufficient information from my interviews to conclude the same, my interviewees, as Carneiro says, were uncomfortable with the topic. I did note that of the eight farmers for whom I obtained educational information, five had a fourth grade education or less; one had completed high school (though her brother was completing a degree in agronomy); and two farmers, both organic farmers working with SMASAN, had graduated from college. Only one SMASAN farmer, Marquinho, was willing to disclose his income—about R$1,000 per month. If his family size is in the median size range of four to six people for Southeastern rural regions (IBGE 2006), the possible per capita family income (R$166 to R$250) would put them between somewhat below to within the median per capita income range of R$208 to R$415. Five non-SMASAN farmers reported R$–100 (negative) to R$3,000 in monthly net income, that is, income after expenses. The R$3,000 figure comes from a farm with two families on it. So the five farms averaged R$655 per month. Calculating their median per capita income as above yields lower figures between R$109 and R$164. Given that only one SMASAN farmer gave precise responses about income, along with a very small number of non-SMASAN farms, it is not possible to make a systematic comparison. In qualitative terms, at least, the one SMASAN farmer who disclosed his income reported that it had increased since he joined SMASAN, along with an overall sense of economic security and stability. Indeed, the farmer, Marquinho, said that he had been able to expand the number of crops he grew since he joined DdR in 1996. Before, he had sold his products to CEASA and had to concentrate on growing large quantities of one or two crops in order to win purchase agreements. But under SMASAN, he had branched out to eight to fourteen different crops on his one- to two-ha plot. (He also owned another plot a few miles away where he mainly grew lettuce.) In interviews in 2005 and 2006, Marquinho seemed relatively confident about his present and future economic security, although he did say he wasn’t sure what he would do if SMASAN or their partnership ended. He was also one of the two farmers with sharecroppers, with six working on his smaller site. It appeared that he also personally

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tended to his own areas and still ran day-to-day operations, as opposed to one SMASAN farmer, Ricardo, whose sharecroppers essentially ran all farm functions. (We will return to the implications of such an arrangement later in the chapter.) Despite the dearth of quality economic data for most of the farms, it is suggestive that the SMASAN farmer mentioned above, Ricardo, had profited such that he was able to essentially retire to acting only as a landowner for his sharecroppers, who ran almost all his farm operations. In this sense, Ricardo became someone who arguably no longer fit the criteria for the DdR program—to support small family farmers. It is also suggestive that in 2005 and 2006, Marquinho expressed he had arrived upon a relatively high degree of economic security and planned to further diversify his offerings. His plans contrasted with the state of the Santoses, a family of non-SMASAN farmers I also interviewed in 2006. The Santoses, according to one family member, were struggling: Yes, [it’s complicated]. I’m even thinking that we may stop [farming]. It’s not working, it’s not worth it. There’s a lot of exploitation, no? A lot of exploitation. The reseller [intermediary/atravessador] comes to buy. . . . We’re suffering here. It keeps getting worse. Years ago, we still went [to BH] to the market. Now, they’ve found a way, they have people who carry products directly to the supermarket, they sell it there. . . . It’s only those people who sell, everyone else can’t get in there, you see? So that’s how it is here. The market is in the hands of the few.

As we touched on earlier, resellers, retailers, and other market intermediaries can absorb a significant amount of the profits from the sales of produce. Matheus, a member of the Santos family, claimed that intermediaries charged a 200% markup on their lettuce. According to him, the wholesalers bought boxes of lettuce from them at R$4 and sold them at R$12. Araújo and Alessio (2005) describe a BH market in which the majority of the profit in the process is retained by the intermediary. Producers see these resellers as a necessary evil and acknowledge that it is thanks to them, however, that it becomes possible for them to sell their products. This inevitably gives resellers significant power over farmers, and jibes with Matheus’s characterization. Herbert, another non-SMASAN farmer, told me in 2006 that he didn’t have the resources to go into the city, nor to send someone into the city to sell for him. With no other choice, he sold his produce to CEASA, estimating that he lost R$100 a month in the process. Herbert blamed his problems in part on the “weakness” of the newer hybrid lettuce varieties, feeling like they

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needed excess care to survive in comparison to an heirloom variety, Regina 71, that he was sure was now unavailable but that he characterized as being able to grow pretty much wherever you threw it.9 Four other farmers shared the state of the market and their profits with us in 2007. Two characterized sales, or sale prices, as very bad. One, Henri, sold his products to CEASA. It was unclear to whom the other, Davi, sold. The other two characterized sales as “normal” or “reasonable,” although one of them did call the year’s sales overall “weak.” Neither of these two, however, sold to large intermediaries, CEASA or otherwise. One was able to sell his products directly in the Central Market of BH, while the other, a SMASAN-partnered farmer named Rafael, had stopped selling directly in the market. According to him, he had decided to become a sharecropper instead, saying that it was better to sell to his landowner, leaving the landowner to sell at the market as well to organize and pay for the transport and the fees required to get the products to market.

socioeconomic and political complications for ddr farmers From the limited evidence at hand, it seems as if the farmers who are able to sell directly, or for the one sharecropper at least almost directly, to markets were more optimistic and more likely to evaluate the present economic situation as being “reasonable.” The farmers selling to CEASA or wholesalers—the Santoses, Henri, and Herbert—seemed to evaluate the economic situation more negatively.10 Henri, in fact, stopped growing lettuce in 2006, diversifying instead into three crops—beets, yams, and cabbage—with plans to begin selling directly to the consumer rather than to CEASA. “Frankly I’m going to sell, as someone said, ‘only to the consumers themselves,’” Henri reported. That said, farmer responses were collected across different years, so their perceptions of market conditions might differ across years rather than between farmers. However, as we will return to it, there are additional reasons to think SMASAN might be having a positive economic effect on participating farmers, at least in terms of baseline economic security and their perception of it. Even if SMASAN provides farmers greater economic security, that help does not necessarily mean the security is sufficient to maintain sustainable livelihoods. During a meeting of the Association of Farmers of the DdR program that I was allowed to attend in 2005, these SMASANpartnered farmers complained about low market prices and a variety of

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logistical challenges. There were the funds needed to pay for a truck they shared for transport and the truck’s maintenance. There was the hard time meeting consumer demands season to season. In the wet season, flooding is always a threat, and hard rains damage the delicate and valuable leaves of their lettuces and similar crops. In the dry season, periods of direct sun and little rain can damage and drag down the size and yield of their crops. The farmers felt that other producers and sellers undercut their prices. A representative from SMASAN at that time indicated that larger-scale vegetable producers at BH’s markets may intentionally undercut other farmers, including SMASAN farmers, with lower prices on smaller, lower-quality produce. The SMASAN staffer’s comments converged with the Santoses’ characterization, although the Santoses were not SMASAN partners (but had applied and hoped to be). Nonetheless they felt that selling directly in the city with SMASAN would put them in competition with large producers who would still undercut their SMASAN-supported prices. On the other hand, SMASAN and DdR farmers strive to grow the “cleanest” and most attractive produce, which in their minds justifies prices—set by SMASAN—that might at times exceed the lowest prices found in supermarkets. They appear to seek to compete with supermarkets based on produce quality alongside price. Geographers Erin Pratley and Belinda Dodson (2014) reported that even when the set prices for DdR producers were raised during a particularly damaging rainy season, most farmers chose to maintain their (lower) prices to avoid losing customers. In one case, a farmer lowered her price during this difficult time, as she felt it would be unfair to sell her smaller, “uglier” greens at the normal price. SMASAN and others, Araújo and Alessio among them, have argued the latter effect is positive, increasing accessibility by lowering prices at even noncontrolled stores. However, several problems also arise out of these dynamics. As we reviewed in chapter 2, lower prices are not an unmitigated boon to food security. Although it cannot be definitively established with the limited evidence gathered here, these observations are consistent with the existence of one or more of the various “treadmills” we previously identified that can entrap farmers. The promise of ongoing oversupplies of food and lower food prices can help the urban poor to an appreciable extent. Lower prices also provide indirect subsidies to food processors and large-scale concerns like supermarkets (and “hypermarkets,” as some of them are called in Brazil). But this comes at the cost of compromising the

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livelihoods and economic sustainability of farmers, particularly smallerscale ones. These concepts are consistent with the pattern pointed out by Marquinho earlier, wherein farmers grow a large amount of one particular product to sell to intermediaries. The intermediaries, who are not interested in buying a diversity of food products from many smaller farmers, take advantage of their role as a “necessary evil” for farmers with limited resources to access the city. They can force down the price they pay farmers who cannot afford to go directly to market. If intermediaries were indeed generating 100–200% markups on the price of the produce, that leaves them a substantial cushion to cut their prices. The prospect of too few buyers of farmers’ products, and the collectively counterproductive but individually rational response of further increasing production, can contribute to farmers getting less money for their products than is fair or efficient. Although SMASAN members recognize the trap, and such circumstances are taking the shape of the kind of “market failure” SMASAN has begun to address in terms of urban food security (Rocha 2007), the politics of the situation can set limits on SMASAN’s ability to respond. SMASAN has no jurisdiction outside of the city, and as much as the programs like DdR are indeed partly targeted at reestablishing a vibrant countryside to reduce pressure from in-migration to the city (Rocha and Lessa 2009), their outreach to local farmers is limited by the capacity and cooperation of EMATER. There is the additional matter of solving food problems with buying power. As the growing potential of institutional buying seems to be making clear around the world, it is likely an incomplete solution in the face of the still-increasing oligopolies and oligopsonies along every link of the food chain (Howard 2016). SMASAN and its partner farmers are also deeply involved with a potentially problematic rhetoric (and reproduction) of the ideas of “modern” and “clean” food. Although the A’s of adequacy and acceptability do speak to the obvious and necessary place of safety and quality standards, Pratley and Dodson (2014) show that SMASAN and the farmers are arguably preoccupied with these characteristics to their own detriment. There is an absence of the sort of collectivism and social capital–formation between farmer and consumer that “alternative food networks” often aim to generate, such as CSAs, and the kinds of informal interactions where consumers—in theory—are willing to effectively pay the same price for smaller or lower amounts of produce when things are difficult for farmers (Pratley and Dodson 2014). SMASAN and its

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partner farmers appear to be pushing towards, rather than against, ideas of produce as undifferentiated, uniform products, where an appreciation of “ugly,” much less what others call “rustic” or “authentically dirty,” produce fresh from the farm is lacking. Pratley and Dodson also note a troubling shift in the DdR program in which program farmers are increasingly being pushed out of the central, wealthier areas of the city, on the theory that farmers’ stands were ugly and “lower class.” While, clearly, there are numerous reasons for making sure DdR farmers serve poor areas directly and not be exclusively located in the city center—though of course, many lower-income citizens would come across them there on their way to or from work— a balanced approach that also allows farmers to access busier or wealthier markets seems responsibly pragmatic. A diversity of produce for a diversity of markets across the region protects farmers from consumer volatility. Apparently, however, a number of administrators in SMASAN and other municipal agencies believe that “first world cities don’t have street vendors” (Pratley and Dodson 2014, 79).11 Some farmers appear to have left DdR immediately after the city began to revoke licenses for the city center area. By 2007 the program involved half the number of farmers—eighteen—as it had in 2001. There appears little desire, capacity, or authority in the city to address the sudden decline directly. Indeed, quite the reverse. SMASAN members pointed to additional obstacles from other city secretariats in the pursuit of a “modern” city, a momentum that perhaps would have been addressed in the era of strong interdepartmental coordination with SMASAN under Mayor Patrus Ananias, but, as we saw in the last chapter, the focus of the problem, policy, and politics streams of the city seems to have moved on from food security for now. All that said, within the small group of producers I interviewed, it did appear that selling to SMASAN generated more security as there was a near guarantee of sales at the DdR markets, sometimes supplemented by one-off purchases from SMASAN programs like School Meals and Popular Restaurants, and since the mid-2000s, purchases through PAA as well. Second, selling directly to consumers, whether or not a farmer was involved in SMASAN, seemed to achieve better prices for the farmers, who were more likely to describe the prices they received as “normal” or “reasonable” in 2006, as opposed to farmers selling to intermediaries, be they private or a public company like CEASA.12 And

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in the case of Zero Hunger’s PAA specifically, there has been evidence that the purchase programs assure some amount of “baseline” sales and livelihood that provide an important foundation for building agency— food sovereignty—among farmers (Wittman and Blesh 2015). On the other hand, SMASAN clearly has ample room for improvement in terms of creating socioeconomic and political spaces for farmers to build social connections, and even more importantly, social power. In fact, there are multiple signs that it is moving in the opposite direction.

addressing adequacy: sustainable practices and smasan In the course of my participant observations with SMASAN staff on partner and prospective farms and in interviews with SMASAN functionaries, the environmental and agroecological aspects of their work were openly enunciated by staff members and administrators.13 The possibility of supporting biodiversity and sustainability through supporting improved farmer practices in the Atlantic Forest region was explicitly acknowledged and promoted in my interviews with SMASAN administrators José and Rubens, though neither, it should be noted, is still with SMASAN. Although no one used the specific Five A’s of food security terminology, their general environmental awareness reflected the third A, adequacy, in terms of producing food using environmentally sustainable practices. Although the sensibility was far from uniform even in 2006–2007, the outlook of a significant portion of the senior staff reflected a comprehensive approach to food security that embraced all parts of the Five A’s framework. Still, the limited staff and financial resources dedicated to SMASAN, as well as the BH city government’s lack of jurisdiction over rural areas, inhibit the agency’s ability to aggressively push a rural agenda beyond passively supporting links between local farmers and consumers. SMASAN was only able to set up its DdR and similar programs with significant help from EMATER, whose agents helped find and recruit the original participant farms, and which has an agent permanently positioned at SMASAN to aid in communication between SMASAN and allied producers and in the enforcement of standards. Positive sensibilities, however, can go only so far. An important question is whether the (possible) baseline economic security provided by DdR can help encourage farmers to use more sustainable practices. If so, are there any signs of effects on biodiversity?

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Grappling with the Practical With respect to practices, in the case of Marquinho, not only did he diversify his crops but he also cut down on pesticide use after he entered the program, “because,” he shared in his interview, “we wanted to sell a much fresher, healthier product, so we are avoiding using pesticides as much as we can. We hardly ever use it now.” This is an important element in considering adequacy and environmental sustainability, as agroecologists and conservation biologists have found that for most organisms, increases in “planned biodiversity,” or the diversity of the crops and animals a farmer rears, correlate with increased “associated biodiversity,” or the unplanned, “natural” flora and fauna on a farm and in nearby habitats. Henri, a non-SMASAN farmer who said he used hardly any pesticides and fertilized his plants with both animal manure and synthetic fertilizers, also diversified his crops in this time period. Henri explained that this was an attempt to entice consumers in direct sales and because he felt that lettuce farming had become too unprofitable. But Henri also voiced agreement with the statement that the rainforest, which he thought was important to preserve, helped maintain equilibrium on his farm with a very low level of pests. The forest offered the additional benefit of acting as a windbreak. The one organic farmer I interviewed, SMASAN partner Edmar, grew around fifteen kinds of vegetables, and refrained from using pesticides. He explained that this was originally simply because he and his wife were growing only for themselves and wanted to avoid external, synthetic inputs out of concerns about their health effects. In contrast, SMASAN partner Ricardo did use synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers, according to a brief conversation I had with him, though in an extended interview, one of the sharecroppers who effectively helped manage the farm was unable to name which ones. It is nevertheless clear that synthetic pesticide and fertilizer use did not bifurcate simply along SMASAN/non-SMASAN lines. The Santoses and Henri worried about the health and environmental effects of pesticides, and the Santoses explicitly expressed aspirations to turn their farm organic. In the other direction, it seems at least likely that Ricardo used pesticides more often than those who said they “hardly ever used it.” In terms of other conditions and practices that affect biodiversity, based on on-site observations, it appeared that all of the farmers tilled their soil (which can have strongly negative effects on biodiversity), and that the occasional heavy rain contributed greatly to erosion (which has multiple negative environmental

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implications). Only one farm used green manure, an agroecological practice that reduces or replaces the need for synthetic fertilizers by rotating cash crops with nitrogen-fixing crops (Gardner and Drinkwater 2009). Though at least in 2003, one other SMASAN farmer used green manure, based on a visit I made on Cecilia Rocha’s biannual study trip to BH before I began formal data collection. Most of the farmers I studied used chicken manure, and a few cow manure. Both the former manager of the Incentives for Basic Production programs and the EMATER extensionist working with SMASAN often quite clearly encouraged farmers to reduce synthetic inputs and move towards organic production. On the other hand, during a participant observation at a monthly meeting on organic agriculture in BH facilitated by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, their successor emphasized that SMASAN dealt, and had to deal, primarily in price rather than whether food is organic or otherwise “sustainable.”14 Multiple SMASAN staff members have made similar comments over the years, saying that they were statutorily compelled to choose among the bids coming in at or below a government/university-researched “appropriate” price, which was based on market prices and production costs for conventionally produced agricultural products. Small-scale, organic, and agroecological farmers were usually unable to compete on price, as well as on the logistic requirements to deliver adequate quantities with regularity. So it does appear that, at least in the mid-2000s, meeting the environmentally sustainable aspect of adequacy in the Five A’s was a goal held by at least several members of the senior staff—there were even plans at one time for an Agroecology Reference Center housed in SMASAN—but that this A was clearly an area of difficulty.15 SMASAN has neither jurisdiction nor staff in the rural areas around BH, relying at the time of my research primarily on the EMATER extensionist attached to SMASAN, Edgar. While Edgar enthusiastically endorsed sustainable and organic agriculture during the several trips to farms on which I accompanied him, he was the one staff member dedicated exclusively to working with farmers, and could offer largely only moral support for farmers to engage in such methods. To even reach these farmers, Edgar had to compete with other departments for the use of the one car assigned to SMASAN staff for travel. The Santoses, for instance, were applying to work with SMASAN in 2006. However, the next year they told me that they were unable to stay in consistent contact with SMASAN, including Edgar, or to clarify the requirements for entry into its programs. The disconnect made a

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transition to organic more difficult as they simultaneously saw their economic security eroding. A Santos brother, who was taking agronomy courses, was enthusiastic about organic methods, but he felt that some of his family members resisted it, preferring to stay with the methods they knew and with which they were comfortable, especially in the context of the relative hardship and uncertain market. Similarly, one of the farmers interviewed by Pratley (2012) voiced some interest in organic practices, but was worried that she would not be able to recover the costs of certification with the set prices of DdR.16 On the other hand, multiple farmers Pratley interviewed acknowledged avoiding synthetic sprays. One described how her no-pesticide policy had helped build a relationship with her customers around ideals of health and hygiene. She expressed reservations about her husband’s use of sprays and his lack of agroecological consideration on the plots he managed. But what of our friends at Pastorinhas, whom we introduced at the start of this chapter? Pratley interviewed the team in 2007 for her 2012 dissertation. During my own primary research from 2003 to 2007, I did not meet with or interview the two participating farmers there. The Pastorinhas settlement now has an explicit focus on agroecology, in line with the MST’s larger movement goals. In contrast to my eventual visits to Pastorinhas in 2010 and 2012, Pratley’s initial interactions indicated skepticism for agroecology on the part of SMASAN and EMATER, with an expectation that farmers would be better off depending on the “modern” knowledge of agricultural “experts.” Although, in line with Pratley’s experiences, one SMASAN staff member cautioned me in a 2010 visit that these were “simple farmers.” This reflects a slow shift—an erosion, from the vantage of the Five A’s—in SMASAN since its creation, as the administrators I worked with left or were replaced with staff who did not, apparently, share their embrace of adequacy and sustainability. Though one wonders—hopes—that another difference may be the years between Pratley’s visits and mine. Perhaps the persistence of the farmers in Pastorinhas convinced some members of SMASAN and EMATER. Perhaps the “agroecologists’ paradise” being built there worked its charms on them. Or maybe they “read the crowd” and played to the biases of their visitors at the time (during both visits I was joined by several others). But other notable possibilities include the effects of a larger shift in Brazil, including the tension across a bifurcated system, with, on one hand, considerable state support for agribusiness, monoculture, and exports and, on the other, a long history in agroecology on the part of environmentalists and some small farmers’ groups, as

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well as Brazil’s vibrant agricultural and natural biodiversity. Brazil’s impeached former president Dilma Rouseff signed a presidential decree supporting agroecology in 2012. Elements of EMATER have grown to institutionalize engagement with agroecology. A vibrant National Agroecology Alliance has been building momentum (Petersen, Mussoi, and Dal Soglio 2013; participant observation at the Regional Seminar on Agroecology in Latin America and the Caribbean in Brasilia, June 24–26, 2015). Perhaps, as predicted by the MSA, agroecology will make its way through the problems, policies, and politics streams of Brazil and into BH in the coming years, establishing or reinvigorating, depending on the assessment, agroecology and food security at SMASAN. According to the MSA, many of the stream “enablers” do appear to be building up for a new push in programming. SMASAN and Ant Biodiversity To return to where we began the chapter, we collected samples of ant biodiversity as an initial indicator of what was happening, ecologically speaking, on SMASAN farms, as opposed to non-SMASAN farms. We expected the economic security provided by, and proagroecology attitudes of, SMASAN would have an effect on farming practices and local biodiversity. Over the course of 2005 and 2006, we collected samples of ant species from an inactive plot in the farm field and, where present, in the interior of an adjacent forest fragment (Chappell, Moore, and Heckelman 2016). We sampled four farms in 2005, two participating in SMASAN (farmers Marquinho and Ricardo) and two nonparticipants (Henri and the Santoses). In 2006, all previous sites were resampled, and three sites were added: two SMASAN (Rafael, and a second plot managed by Marquinho’s spouse), and one non-SMASAN (Herbert, who is Henri’s brother). We identified the ant species with help from the myrmecologist Jacques Delabie and the Laboratory of Myrmecology, Center for Cacao Research of the Executive Planning Commission for Cacao Farming (CEPEC/CEPLAC) in Itabuna, Brazil. While we won’t get into the technical weeds, understanding a bit more about the ecological details will help as I summarize the broader results. Biodiversity can be broken down into two of several basic measures. One, species richness, is based on the number of different species at a given site (called alpha diversity).17 Beta diversity, on the other hand, is the turnover in species identity from site to site. Which is to say,

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sites A and B can have the exact same richness—say, five species each— but the overall situation is different if the sites have exactly the same five species, which would represent low beta diversity, or if one site hosted a completely different set of five species than the other.18 After compensating for other factors in the landscape that can affect biodiversity—fragment size and number of fragments, the time of year, and so on—we found that participation in SMASAN appeared to be correlated with greater alpha diversity. Specifically, SMASAN sites had, on average, between one quarter and eight more ant species per farm. Given that there was an average of about fourteen species per site, this reflects a difference in diversity that could be meaningful to conservation efforts. SMASAN farms also appeared to have greater beta diversity among them than non-SMASAN farms, meaning that if you look at the sum total of SMASAN sites, there will be more diversity across all of them together than there is in the sum total across all non-SMASAN sites. That’s because there’s more variation within the kinds of species present at SMASAN farms. Although our results are preliminary, as they are based on a small sample size, and are conditioned upon other caveats that we will discuss shortly, they do line up with other recent research that has found higher beta diversity within agroecological systems compared to otherwise similar high-intensity farms that incorporate greater amounts of synthetic inputs and fewer agroecological practices (e.g., Karp et al. 2012). In other words, it seems SMASAN farms represent a higher-quality matrix than their non-SMASAN equivalents. In support of that conclusion, SMASAN farms and their adjacent forest fragments had more species in common than non-SMASAN farms and their adjacent fragments. In other words, SMASAN farms appeared to represent habitats that were more similar to the forest habitat, which is precisely how a higher-quality matrix is supposed to work. This, too, echoes the prolific research— mostly in coffee and cacao systems, not vegetable agriculture—on potentially positive effects of agroecological methods on threatened biodiversity in fragmented natural habitats (Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright 2009; Winqvist, Ahnström, and Bengtsson 2012). However, as we learned in the previous section, there is little evidence of a clear difference in practices between SMASAN and non-SMASAN farms, though this is both because my interviews with farmers did not provide precise details of their practices and because practices seemed to vary across the two categories. Given this, there are several possible interpretations of these results.

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Analyzing Farming Practice and Biodiversity The most straightforward possible explanation for our results, naturally, is that we had a small sample size. This means the results we got could be “false positives,” based on the random chance that the farmers we interviewed were a biased representation of farmers overall, in either group. Although there is no particular reason that this should have biased the results in favor of SMASAN’s effects on biodiversity, the possibility cannot be ruled out. The data theoretical approach we used in our analysis, technically speaking, simply says that the most likely explanation of the results, given the data we have, includes a positive effect of SMASAN participation. The main implication of this would be the need to sample larger groups, and to perhaps conduct extended participant observation alongside farmer interviews in order to better assess practices. A second possibility is that the results are accurate representations of each group, but that SMASAN farms themselves are run by an atypical group of farmers. Perhaps the farms or farmers who opt into SMASAN programs are systematically different in character than those who do not. At least in terms of the characteristics of their land, however, and the information on their socioeconomic backgrounds we obtained from our interviews, there is no direct indication of this. A third possibility is that involvement in SMASAN really has contributed to greater alpha and beta diversities on participating farms. If this were the case, it could be the result of the increased financial security, and perhaps income, SMASAN farmers appear to be receiving based on access to stable, reliable, and fairly priced markets for their produce. As we noted earlier, financial security is one of the factors that research has tied to the adoption of agroecological practices, in addition to associated social cues. It is possible, therefore, that the better outlook and positive attitudes with regards to economic stability and security expressed by SMASAN farmers during the period of 2005–2007 may be reflected in the quality of their management, supporting biodiversity in subtle and indirect ways. For example, a farmer may increase crop diversity in response to the baseline security provided by DdR, or a farmer may report that she had dramatically cut down on pesticide use after she entered the program. This raises the additional possibility, in terms of the mechanism for any putative differences in biodiversity, that the process of preparing for and adhering to SMASAN’s quality and safety standards has altered farmer practices in ways that better support

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biodiversity. However, as we have seen, some of these practices and characteristics are shared by some non-SMASAN farmers as well. Based on our direct observations, use of synthetic pesticide and fertilizers among all farmers varied and did not seem to differentiate neatly between SMASAN and non-SMASAN, although no farmers kept exact records of pesticide amounts or time of application, making precise comparison difficult. However, we have seen, at least according to my experiences from 2003 to 2012, that SMASAN staff working with the farmers—both the extensionists and the former coordinator of the DdR program—often quite clearly encouraged them to reduce synthetic inputs and move towards organic production. In addition, some pertinent staff with influence on the programs had consistently voiced support for sustainability and agroecological production, which have at various times appeared as both formal and informal goals of SMASAN’s programs (though not necessarily or consistently within DdR). A last, and nonexclusive, explanation for the putative impacts upon biodiversity may be the role played by SMASAN extensionists. After a series of initial visits from which farmers are selected for the program, participants are visited by SMASAN’s extension agent at least once a year. There is the annual visit to monitor conformance to standards, but SMASAN’s extensionists occasionally visit to respond to specific issues that may arise. The guaranteed yearly contact and occasional further interactions, and the fact that, during my observations, the extension agents attached to SMASAN have been, or become, proponents of organic agriculture and agroecology, offer a potential direct mechanism for differences between SMASAN and non-SMASAN farms. The farmers we interviewed cited guidance and interactions from extension as being fundamental to their understanding of how to use pesticides effectively and safely, how to reduce pesticide use (i.e., as-needed spot treatments as opposed to regular broadcast applications), and how to use organic methods. Greater BH’s Farmers and Sustainability In contrast, farmers in both categories reported difficulties in engaging with their local state extension agents. They reported that it had become harder to find and enroll in the classes that state extension previously offered, and that it was increasingly difficult to get these extensionists to visit promptly in response to requests. One family felt that greater responsibilities had been put on local governments to support extension

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and other aid to resident small farmers, despite the status of extension as a nominally state-government-funded entity. Further cutbacks are reflected in the national spending numbers on agriculture: from 5.6% of government expenditure (~R$21 million) in 1985–1989 to 1.8% of expenditures (~R$11 million) over 2003–2005 (Chaddad and Jank 2006). Even within SMASAN, economist and inaugural SMASAN secretary Maria Regina Nabuco and sociologist Léa Guimarães Souki (2004, 16) noted that “after an expansion between 1994 and 1999, [DdR] suffered a contraction between 2000 and 2003. This fact can be explained by the reduction in the number of extensionists contracted with EMATER.” Nevertheless, compared to their peers, SMASAN farmers are essentially guaranteed to see an extension agent with some regularity. Depending on their attitude and expertise, the agent may serve as an additional prod and opportunity to learn, implement, or maintain sustainable practices. Other key factors in the adoption of more sustainable practices are access to adequate information and local social cues (Baumgart-Getz Prokopy, and Floress 2012). The degree to which farmers’ and technicians’ perceptions influence practices and production results can be surprising (Bulte et al. 2014). The current and former SMASAN extensionists were observed to spend time consulting with the farmers and discussing the practical aspects of implementation with them. This time advising and consulting was, both extensionists admitted, beyond the strict scope of their job description, but something they nonetheless viewed as a priority and in keeping with the unwritten spirit of SMASAN’s programs. However, limited staff and financial resources do not allow those within SMASAN to encourage sustainable practices as much as they would like. Even opportunities to disseminate information on such practices within SMASAN itself, such that functionaries in other sections and program areas can understand and buy in to this thrust as well, are limited. A lack of effective dissemination of information was a consistent complaint across farmers, SMASAN and non-SMASAN, as well as among functionaries within SMASAN, including José and Antônio. That notwithstanding, the attitude even among some nonSMASAN farmers that pesticides are to be avoided or minimized is not surprising when put into a larger context. The farmers we interviewed supported the Brazilian law requiring them to keep 20% of their land in Atlantic Forest, although interestingly, many felt that other farmers did not share their views or understand the importance of forest conser-

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vation. Almost all of them mentioned the essential nature of the forest fragments in maintaining their sources of water, with Marquinho and the Santoses pointing out that they had observed some streams drying up as development encroached into the rural areas and residential neighborhoods were built where forest once stood. The Santoses were concerned that rapid development of their area into residential zones would affect the amount and quality of water they were going to be able to obtain, especially considering that pumping water for irrigation was, apparently, the largest expense in their budget (around R$1,400 per month). All of the farmers agreed that there was less Atlantic Forest now than when they began farming or when they were youths, and most said that they see fewer native animals and plants on and around the farm now. The reasons the farmers supported the preservation of the Atlantic Forest usually started with its vital role in maintaining sources of water, but their concerns also extended beyond the ecosystem services it provided to them. Several expressed appreciation of the forest as the patrimony of Brazil, or even explained that it was simply necessary to conserve it, to protect the natural areas. According to non-SMASAN farmer Rafael, a sharecropper with about three ha under production: The environment is what you have to fight for the most—the environment. Because some years from now, these little kids you see, they’re not going to even live as long as we live today. They’ll live to—people won’t live longer than sixty years. . . . [The Atlantic Forest] has value for my farm and as a national heritage in itself. Because, people . . . for us, if you didn’t have the forest, cleared everything away, you wouldn’t have any pleasure. . . . The value it has to us, it has no [certain] value because you can’t carry it away, you can’t sell it, you can’t do anything with it. It’s nature. . . . Of course you have to preserve [it].

Henri put it similarly: “It’s a future, to leave it here. . . . You have to preserve it, because of our children. So, we keep letting it be, we keep working, and we’ll be leaving it for them.” The general attitudes of the interviewed farmers aligned well with the findings of a general survey of the Brazilian population from 2001, wherein sociologist Solange Simões found that Brazilians, in general, supported preserving the environment and to varying degrees valued it for its own existence, affirming that it was worth the costs (i.e., higher taxes) to do so.19 Given this backdrop of general support for conservation, and within this study the broad consciousness of the negative effects of chemical inputs, there seems if nothing else a solid base to spread alternate and organic agricultural measures. All farmers cited guidance and interactions

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from EMATER as fundamental to both their understanding of how to use pesticides effectively and safely—from both courses offered by EMATER and site visits by extension agents—and of how to reduce pesticide application or introduce agroecological methods. Given this, why hasn’t SMASAN recruited more farmers? Why aren’t there more SMASAN partners or more support for organic farmers? And what other institutions are affecting farmer practices and viewpoints? We will examine these questions next.

institutional influences on the farmers of greater bh The farmers we interviewed consistently named EMATER as one of the most prominent influences on them. Most had taken a class with EMATER at some point, often on how to treat pest outbreaks and how to safely and effectively use pesticides. The majority commented that if they had questions about a new method, or how to treat a new pest, they would contact EMATER and follow whatever procedures the agency recommended. Several explicitly pointed to EMATER as the only government organization with which they interacted, although they nonetheless also sold to CEASA, a hybrid/semigovernmental organization. The Santoses and Marquinho mentioned EMATER explicitly as their source of familiarity with concepts related to agroecology and organic production. Rafael said he now used less of a less potent pesticide, as recommended by an EMATER agronomist. Generally, he said, he learned how to treat pests through trial and error, by “living and learning,” but that occasionally someone from EMATER would come and explain how to improve his farm’s practices. His team would watch and follow the EMATER agent’s advice. One of the members of the Santos family was within a year of finishing an agronomy degree, sharing that he was learning a lot “about what we do wrong!” Previously, EMATER would come into their area and offer classes. Marília Santos, a forty-four-year-old farmer, said: “I actually like the people from EMATER a lot. All my life, they’ve given us a good lot of attention. . . . We were well covered. They gave classes on cheese, meat, when we wanted to smoke meat, on that, they gave all those classes.” But, she added, “Lately they’re kind of halfway gone, but before we had a lot of assistance. They gave a lot of courses. They’ve stopped now, I don’t know why.” This last appeared a recurring observation among the farmers; that it has become both harder to find EMATER classes and more difficult to

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get extensionists to the farm promptly. Several observed that you can call EMATER if you have a problem, but you’re not sure when they’ll get there, and that until recently they were “everywhere”—including in an office next to the church one farmer attended. Now, the farmer noted, he had no idea where to find EMATER locally, and while an agent will come eventually, it is almost always after a significant delay. SMASAN functionaries themselves repeatedly identified EMATER as one of their most important partners. EMATER helped SMASAN to recruit farmers for DdR to start with. José and Antônio expressed a wish that they could work with EMATER more to recruit, support, and encourage farmers, especially in regards to sustainable and organic practices. Indeed, Edmar, the SMASAN organic farmer, noted that SMASAN needed greater outreach and information dissemination, especially in educating consumers, and perhaps school children, on the benefits of organic food. And both Marquinho and the Santoses expressed wishes to see SMASAN and EMATER alike come into the countryside more often, and to resume recruiting and registering new farmers to the program. As it was, José described in 2005, SMASAN depended on their one dedicated EMATER agronomist, Edgar, and the one car that they shared with the entire secretariat, to conduct such outreach and educational efforts. Edgar encouraged organic practices, but as the lone technician assigned to the then thirty-five farmers or so in DdR and the organic fairs, with the one inconsistently available car, it is easy to see his difficulty. Meanwhile, EMATER itself appears to undergoing a financial and staffing crunch. The perception the Santoses shared was that the state was devolving responsibilities for EMATER to the local governments. It now depended on whether local mayors paid close enough attention to the issues of small farmers and dedicated resources to supporting EMATER agents for that region. Although I was unable to confirm this possibility, the contention aligned with other farmers’ perceptions. By a variety of mechanisms, municipalities have been reassigned decentralized powers and responsibilities. The devolution stems from the tendencies during the dictatorship to bypass state governments, expectations further reinforced in the 1988 Constitution that formalized shifting powers from the federal government directly to local governments, skipping over state governments. Although such shifts have potential benefits, they also threaten to degrade into well-established patterns of patronage. José said that SMASAN partnered with EMATER because of its ubiquity within the state of Minas Gerais and its ability to reach small

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farmers in every part of the state, bypassing the significant number of latifundios and plantations of large landowners. But the impression of the farmers and SMASAN members we interviewed was that coverage was much spottier now. Marquinho said he had not seen an EMATERSMASAN recruiting group spend significant time in the countryside since he was part of a large recruiting drive around 1995–1996. And as we remarked upon, Nabuco and Souki (2004) confirmed a decrease in the number of EMATER agents involved. The contraction, which made things difficult for SMASAN and local farmers in several ways, appears to have the potential to further damage SMASAN’s efforts by affecting the embeddedness of their program.

state-society synergy, smasan, and local farmers Geographers Erin Pratley and Belinda Dodson (2014) pursued their own analysis of SMASAN’s programs and BH-area farmers. Our team’s analysis differs in important ways, as we have explored here in this book. But regardless of the differences in our views, I think we all share a hope that “alternative food networks,” such as those built in BH, can deliver results that are ultimately liberatory. As I have touched on repeatedly, greater equality and the suite of basic human rights—including agency and substantive democracy—are keys to a world without hunger. Where new approaches and networks fail to deliver on this promise, we need look to how they can be modified for the better or perhaps even replaced wholesale. Pratley and Dodson (2014) write that “there was some limited economic empowerment in the [DdR] program. . . . Nevertheless, [farmers] had little power to decide and set a fair price for their produce as the prices of inputs and on-farm factors changed” (81). Thus, “in Belo Horizonte, farmers were relegated to marginal physical spaces, and had limited economic and political power,” yielding “broader social justice implications” (72). The geographers quote one farmer: “it is not like we can do anything about it, politicians have the power” (83). These findings are not incompatible with the tentatively positive effects I observed, as the achievement of supporting area farmers is indeed limited by a lack of capacity and responsibility within SMASAN. The gaps are not limited to DdR. As I noted in the previous chapter, SMASAN programs have been characterized by a dearth of information among potential urban patrons and beneficiaries of SMASAN; a lack of

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sufficient staff to more aggressively pursue education efforts, engage in the community, or even efficiently register all of the potential beneficiaries; and clear problems with community representation, particularly with regards to poorer urban communities. There are many ways to analyze the social interactions that explain the successes of SMASAN, as well as the lacunae and missteps. One that I find to be useful, and will deploy here, is the concept of “state-society synergy,” especially with regards to collective goods such as human rights and food security in particular. Political sociologist Peter Evans (1996), among other scholars, recognized that partnerships across the state-societal divide can enhance policy effectiveness and efficiency. He wanted to assess what might make such partnerships more or less likely to succeed. As a fruitful state-society partnership arguably can produce more in collaboration than what each would accomplish alone, under many circumstances synergies can be treated as desirable objectives. Correspondingly, the more conditions for synergy are enabled, the more likely that a program, policy, or course of action will be successful in improving the public good. Evans distinguished two forms of synergy: complementarity and embeddedness. Complementarity is essentially the general principle that certain processes and services, such as collective goods, can be better provided by governments, while others are more suitable to efforts by private enterprise. As such, this aspect of synergy should allow for the more effective realization of various social priorities than what either the state or private action could deliver alone. Embeddedness, for which I think complications get a bit more interesting, is the principle that interpersonal ties connecting citizens and public officials across the government/society boundary are foundationally important for the effective implementation of policies and programs. These relationships, embodying mutual trust, friendship, and other informal connections, actualize implementation and when connected to the greater social good discourage costly behaviors such as free riding and rent seeking.20 Although embeddedness itself is an enabling factor, to some degree it also relies on other societal and institutional factors for its creation, maintenance, and effectiveness. Drawing on the work of a number of other scholars, Evans’s analysis infers five conditions that enable effective use of embeddedness in state-society relationships: 1. Competent government bureaucracy; 2. Democratic and competitive politics;

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3. “Rules of the game” regulating how politicians compete with each other and interact with society (i.e., the rule of law, which Evans calls the “quintessential complementary good” and—in the best case, to be sure—which minimizes corruption and state violence); 4. Egalitarian social structures that give the poor and powerless access to decision makers in order to minimize the ability of the elite and wealthy to maintain the status quo; and 5. Complementarity itself. Complementarity enabling embeddedness may seem contradictory, with embeddedness and complementarity listed as different types of synergy. The apparent conceptual tension is really just a dialectical twist. The first four elements of embeddedness are more likely to occur with the relevant complementarity in place: for instance, government and societal actors working to coproduce goods, engaging perhaps in mutual oversight, but not necessarily working directly together on all of the elements of a project. So, back to BH, operationalizing synergy and determining its effects on food policy require scrutinizing the composite elements enabling complementarity and embeddedness. Although we should take neither the complexities nor presence of “competent bureaucracy” and the “rules of the game” for granted, I will do so here in SMASAN’s case in order to concentrate on competitive politics, egalitarian social structures, and complementarity. Certainly basic bureaucratic competence is present in at least minimal or arguably “average” levels in BH. That is, government policies are regularly enacted and implemented in an orderly manner. Clear laws and dispute resolution mechanisms are present in many cases. With regards to concerns related to food security, human rights, and equality, many of the objections one might raise to taking these for granted—the uneven application of rules or differing degrees of competence depending on the pertinent function or social class—are significantly related to “egalitarian social structures” and “democratic and competitive politics.” Starting with complementarity in SMASAN’s programs, particularly in regards to local farmers, there are three pertinent and intersecting areas of activity. First, SMASAN has addressed what it considers a systemic economic inefficiency: the problems of intermediaries, wholesalers, and expensive retailers in the areas of basic food, namely, fruits and

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vegetables. In a bit of intragovernmental complementarity, SMASAN paired with EMATER in order to gain access to local small farmers, who had a history of engagement with EMATER via its extension classes and advice. EMATER had the experience, expertise, and knowledge to find and develop partners among small local farmers, as well as the infrastructure and placement throughout the rural areas around BH. Thus each was able “to do what it did best.” The city created and promoted places for the small farmers to sell directly to consumers, and engaged in some degree of information dissemination regarding the new programs in 1993 and on an albeit more intermittent basis subsequently. EMATER, for its part, helped locate and work with local farmers, to support them in producing safe and high-quality food to SMASAN’s standards, and, at least in a limited number of cases, gave them advice on, and pressure to, adopt more agroecological methods. That is, SMASAN and EMATER’s cooperation allowed them to act in a complementary fashion with local farmers. Although the government of BH created SMASAN to help guarantee the right to food, that did not mean that SMASAN now had the responsibility to produce or distribute food. Rather, in order to support food security, the government was obligated to create conditions wherein people are able to reasonably access safe, healthy, and culturally acceptable foods, and wherein farmers are fairly compensated for it.21 The local farmers were able to do what they were suited and situated to do—produce food. The city in turn helped develop the municipal market in such a way that the farmers received higher prices for their product while simultaneously providing a lower price to poorer BH citizens. As I briefly discussed in chapter 3, partnerships with the ABasteCers (ABCs) and the (now-defunct) Workers’ Convoy partner businesses— which are distinct from and do not necessarily buy from the SMASANallied local producers—allowed those businesses to obtain spaces to sell in populous areas of the city. ABCs were also able to complement the DdR farmers as in most cases the ABCs have a DdR stand in front. There was in addition a general agreement not to sell the same products as each other (Araújo and Alessio 2005).22 Another complementarity can be found between SMASAN and the smaller farmers, in that several of the latter reported that they used the baseline economic stability the program offered as a chance to diversify their crops. Some farmers also felt that the stable purchasing allowed them the space to begin working with other farmers to amass products together, so that they would have

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sufficient amounts for sale to the Popular Restaurants without the worries that would otherwise arise from growing large harvests of a single crop for unreliable wholesalers. Though from Pratley’s 2007 interviews (for her 2012 dissertation), SMASAN admitted that, as a rule, it did not buy from small farmers such as those in DdR due to the logistical challenges. What of the democratic, competitive politics and egalitarian structures? It is here where we can identify some of the current roadblocks for SMASAN. It is significant that democratic, competitive politics are not possible for farmers vis-à-vis SMASAN and the BH government. The municipalities where the farmers live are governed independently from BH. Differing interests, political transience, and party politics often make it difficult for BH to engage in sustained partnerships with nearby rural municipalities. So BH’s government has no direct role in governance of the local farmers, and more importantly, the local farmers do not form part of the city’s constituency and cannot develop the direct pressure to, say, demand more resources for their programs, more recruitment or stand space, or regulation of ABC retailers. Another mismatch is found in the SMASAN-EMATER-producer triangle, as EMATER is influenced by politics at the local, state, and national levels. It is exceedingly difficult for the local SMASAN farmers to exert significant pressure on EMATER’s agenda. Far from egalitarianism, the trajectory of much of Brazil’s history and ongoing socioeconomic inequalities reinforce the difficulties the family farmers partnering with SMASAN have in influencing SMASAN, much less EMATER. Based on my interviews, one could reasonably conclude that the small farmers in general would like EMATER services expanded. But the influences of other factions, including large landowners and farmers, the financial pressures on state and federal governments, the policies and political influences flowing through the latter, and generalized inequality in wealth and land ownership together imply that problems relating to small farmers’ political influence and material needs extend significantly beyond the difficulties around SMASAN alone. On the other hand, in the years since my original research, national programs under Zero Hunger have made a significant difference in rural livelihoods and have begun to back up PT rhetoric and its formal agenda (and as the party promised in allying with movements such as the MST). Farmers interviewed between 2004 and 2007 said that they had heard of Zero Hunger but felt it had no effect on their lives. On the other hand, in informal conversations in 2010, several farmers declared they

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could not survive without the programs. In this case, they seemed specifically to be referring to the Family Allowance (Bolsa Família), a program that has earned international acclaim and been the subject of many attempts at replication elsewhere. The basic gist of the program, what researchers call a “conditional cash transfer,” is that families who qualify by virtue of having an income below a cutoff point receive a modest monthly payment if they fulfill a series of conditions in turn. The latter include maintaining children’s school attendance and vaccinations and getting proper health checkups. Bolsa Família has, by all accounts, been a significant factor in reducing inequality and poverty in Brazil, and has led to numerous other improvements in welfare and well-being (Rocha 2009; de Brauw et al. 2012). Further, Wittman and Blesh (2015) found, promisingly, that Zero Hunger’s PAA and PNAE (Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar, National School Meals Program) purchasing programs helped provide stable, baseline livelihoods for historically marginalized producers in Mato Grasso state. On the other hand, in Mário Campos, a municipality near BH and home to some SMASAN farmers, my colleague Johan Oldekop and I found no effect of one of PAA’s initiatives on agricultural practices, production, or income (Oldekop et al. 2015). Tellingly, we found the gap connected to inconsistent participation from farmers, because of the low prices they received, the lack of responsiveness of the government-set prices to changing conditions, and the centralization of governance of the program. In other words, we found that minimal egalitarian structure and insufficient democratic input on the part of the farmers hamstrung a program’s ability to make a meaningful difference. However, in the 2004–2007 period of my original study, PAA, PNAE, and Bolsa Família did not appear to have achieved significant penetration, in this part of Minas Gerais at least. In this period, the Santoses as well as a number of SMASAN functionaries expressed significant disappointment, even disillusionment, in the national PT government of President Lula. Though there are multiple reasons for this, at least one contributing factor to the disillusionment was that Zero Hunger seemed to have made very limited impact in their lives and programs, despite being one of President Lula’s flagship initiatives. In terms of democratic politics, although there are other parties that can and do challenge the PT—indeed, the party recently lost the presidency upon the impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rouseff—it is unclear what other party could compete on the basis of providing greater support for small farmers and other vulnerable populations.

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The PT is by far the most powerful and influential left party in Brazil, and it is at best questionable as to what degree its nearest competitors have the will and ability to actualize redistributive and support programs pertinent to small farmers and citizens suffering from food insecurity. Although the national politics in Brazil are competitive indeed, there is perhaps insufficient competition in regards to providing for the needs of the groups discussed here. Further, organizing the rural populace has been seen historically as no path to electoral victory, not to mention that patronage and urban clientelism have been far more common as organizing principles than coherent party platforms, making reform of national and state-level policies around extension and family farmers extremely challenging (Skidmore 1999). So although there are democratic and nominally competitive politics, in terms of this specific issue—particularly in conjunction with the effective disenfranchisement of small family farmers compared to influential large-scale agricultural interests—we need question whether this enabling factor for embeddedness requires redress. Here embeddedness ties into egalitarian social structures, speaking to the ability of the less wealthy and less powerful to communicate directly with decision makers within the government. In terms of the MSA analysis presented in the last chapter, the disproportionately wealthy and powerful citizens of Brazil are able to advocate for problem recognition of their specific issues, and significantly influence the politics stream. At the local level, alongside the lack of democratic connection between local farmers and SMASAN, there are other important inequalities present. There are obvious and noticeable class differences between SMASAN functionaries—all those interviewed were college educated—and the farmers, who often share only fourth-grade educations. I observed a certain deference to many of the SMASAN functionaries. Pratley (2012, 253) reports one shocking though believable interaction: “The [SMASAN] administrator dictated what he expected for lunch when he arrived on farm. He did so under the guise of a jest yet it was interpreted by the farmer as a demand, one which was difficult for the farmer to meet as he requested expensive meat and cheese as a part of the lunch.” Pratley reports examples of potential favoritism and retribution, as well as a skepticism of farmers ever aligning with agroecology and food sovereignty, with one official reportedly declaring that it was “‘absurd to think they knew better than college educated people,’ such as himself, with a diploma in agricultural extension.” Similarly, in 2010 when

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I asked one SMASAN administrator about helping farmers pursue additional ventures, such as food processing, or even directly supporting creation of cooperatives, the administrator said that that would be a matter for EMATER; there were no plans for it; and that we should keep in mind that these were “simple farmers.” There clearly remains a number of potential social barriers to free communication, democratic practice, and egalitarianism. SMASAN staff member José also pointed out that there was an inherent inequality in the agency’s relationships with farmers, as it instigated farmer partnerships and issued any subsequent contracts. Suffice it to say, this comment was not contradicted by what I interpreted to be the notably respectful and even awed tone Marquinho took on when speaking of SMASAN and its staff. The lack of frequent contact between the groups, due to staff and transportation limits, moves us further from egalitarianism or even informal democratic accountability. It seemed clear to me that farmers would be potentially well served by a strong farmers’ association or rural union, but all of the farmers I interviewed said that such unions were very rare in their region. Several said such unions were a waste of time. There was, of course, the ongoing DdR Farmers’ Association, but both Pratley and I concluded it was presently weak. Another farmer testified that in that region, he felt that farmers had no history of working or lobbying together. The most cooperative act in which they engage, he said, was an occasional mutirão, an informal system of shared labor where farmers, for example, help each other during harvest season, so that everyone can get all their crops off the field quickly once they’re ready. And mutirão, he said, didn’t seem to happen very often anymore. One final barrier here seems to be the nature of management within SMASAN itself. Its functionaries reported how Nabuco, the agency’s inaugural secretary, made much more of an effort to listen to ideas from everyone within SMASAN, and placed a greater focus on staff meetings to allow people to understand work in other parts of SMASAN and to share their perceptions with management. “She knew everyone’s names,” one SMASANista once commented. Another remarked, “She knew everything that was going on in the secretariat,” and how it fit into a grand plan, with the implication that this was unlike her successors. Under at least some of the secretaries following Nabuco, there ceased to be meetings involving all of the program administrators to discuss programs and plans. Under some of the “new” middle managers (in 2006) there were no within-department meetings either. Without even these internal

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avenues of communication, other means by which to generate responsiveness, coordination, and egalitarianism are obstructed, as those who work most closely with the farmers and EMATER have less of a chance to exchange information or advocate for their partners within the SMASAN organization and have their needs met.23 So, of our factors enabling embeddedness, we can see several indications of effective complementarity, understanding too that we have assumed the consistent rule of law and competent bureaucracy that the lack of SMASAN internal communication and egalitarian social structures may refute. Comparatively, democratic, competitive politics and egalitarianism seem to be in scarcer supply. Direct questioning and observations showed a certain lack of embeddedness in the relationships between producers and SMASAN in terms of personal relationships and links of trust among the individuals within the program. While there seemed to be individual good will and trust, the simple enabler of frequent contact was absent. The opportunities for producers and SMASAN functionaries to get together were limited. The relationships between EMATER and SMASAN face similar barriers. EMATER’s relationship with farmers has been weakened by staff and service cutbacks, leading to less time with individual producers and making trust and friendly connections more difficult. There appears to be potential to rebuild embeddedness. For example, SMASAN’s requirement that farmers join associations in order to sell to SMASAN programs seemed to be in part connected to the revitalization of a previous rural association in Marquinho’s area. The Santoses were looking to become active within the same organization in order to buy inputs in bulk and receive corresponding discounts. They also aimed at collaborating across farms so that they could sell in bulk to wholesalers or city programs, offer variety and quantity, and exert a greater degree of power in opposition to large retailers and even the city itself. Joining an active association could also help increase their ability to make demands of state and local governments as farmers raise their voices together. On the other hand, leadership for the most notable existing farmers’ cooperative association, the Association of Farmers of the DdR, which was created as a forum for communication between producers and the city, appears not very meaningful or representative. According to Araújo and Alessio (2005), SMASAN functionaries apparently viewed the election for association president to be a formality as only 2 of the 20–30 farmers ran for the office. When I attended one of their regular meetings in 2005, I observed only 5 farmers present, out of approximately 25

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farmers in the program that year. Such low attendance appeared a regular occurrence. During my time in BH, the association presidency was held by one of the largest and the most successful of the farmers. Their gross receipts from participation in the SMASAN programs were three to five times the average of other participant farmers in 2002–2003 (participant observation, Meeting of the Association of Farmers of the DdR, March 23, 2004; SMASAN internal documents).

conclusions There appears to be some evidence that SMASAN is having positive effects beyond BH’s borders, including on farmers’ economic conditions and in support of healthy ecosystems. The possibility underlines the importance of studying human activities within the landscape “matrix” jointly with larger sociopolitical systems in the area and beyond. The indirect indications that SMASAN’s efforts appear to foster the kind of agroecology that helps local biodiversity are in line with a growing literature that supports the importance of human social context and agricultural activities in maintaining biodiversity and conservation in larger landscapes (Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright 2009). Focusing only on the nonhuman ecology of such systems may miss larger mechanisms at work.24 Nonetheless, the possibility that the food security programs of SMASAN may be indirectly supporting biodiversity conservation in the surrounding landscape, when sustainability and conservation were only secondary goals with limited resources behind them, is a novel and potentially important contribution to our understanding of the food security–biodiversity nexus. As political agroecologist Rafter Sass Ferguson noted (pers. comm., November 11, 2015), the literature on food security and biodiversity largely addresses the other direction: the ways biodiversity can support food security or the configurations of potential trade-offs between the two (e.g., Snapp et al. 2010; Wittman et al. 2017). We also see the importance of economic security and access to education and information for small farmers, specifically in terms of helping agriculture to be a more sustainable and an integrated part of broader conservation strategies. And the possibility that food security and biodiversity conservation can be supported simultaneously contradicts the well-established common wisdom that human welfare and environmental conservation are, to some degree, inimical to each other. We also see here the importance of economic security and access to education and

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information for small farmers, specifically in terms of helping agriculture be a more sustainable and integrated part of broader conservation strategies. So it is reassuring to think—albeit tentatively—that ending hunger may be able to proceed on a path that is both good for humans and the vastness of nonhuman nature with which we share the planet. To be sure, it will take considerable material and moral support to improve social, economic, and technical resources for farmers. In terms of SMASAN’s efforts more directly, alongside their economic benefits, we still see a dearth of enablers for synergy, the result of which limits the embeddedness between SMASAN and local farmers. There are a variety of means to address the gap, but there are also numerous barriers to immediate change. The farmers and SMASAN must contend with a mismatch in their jurisdictions. There is the oftcomplex situation around electoral politics, all the more so currently postimpeachment. There are limited competitors for small family farmers’ votes. Of course, there is a deep history of inequalities in social power, economic status, education, and class. While SMASAN has perhaps pioneered new ground in urban-rural relationships, it is nonetheless faced with stiff obstacles in the lack of egalitarian social structures and direct political connection between the farmers and SMASAN, as well as a dearth in political competitiveness for farmers across political parties. EMATER, meanwhile, is scaling back, which is already having negative consequences on SMASAN’s ability to outreach, disseminate information, and build relationships with local farmers, even in some cases already threatening the farmers’ abilities to maintain operations. That is, even the degree of complementarity that has worked well so far is in danger. Whereas there are avenues for SMASAN to rebuild enablers of the synergy at the heart of its success, a sensibility circulates at SMASAN that such efforts are not part of the agency’s job, and certainly not in terms of the farmers who are outside BH’s constituency. As I did not conduct an extended or expansive study of the farmers throughout the region and cannot, unfortunately, speak to their own food security, it is worth raising the possibility that these enablers are also embroiled in the liberatory conditions required to realize the end of regional hunger. SMASAN’s devotion to food security, while unique in extending the department’s objectives to supplying local farmers with sustainable livelihoods, is nonetheless no guarantor.

chapter 6

Conclusions Belo Horizonte and Beyond

When you plant a seed, you need rain, soil, and luck. —Respondent quoted in Kingdon (2010, 77)

One can draw any number of lessons from the dramatic, but incomplete, successes of Belo Horizonte (BH) and its national-level counterpart, Fome Zero. But in conjunction with the frameworks we have examined in this book, I propose two “stories” that emerge from BH and that can help us learn how to continue, and eventually win, the fight to end hunger. The first story, which we have returned to frequently throughout this book, is that to end hunger, we need to drop the notion that it is primarily about producing more food. We must instead decisively embrace a holistic and multifaceted approach, such as the Five A’s framework. We will return to this story only briefly, in order to concretely summarize its lessons. The second story, which we will examine in more depth, returns to the key message of chapter 2: ending hunger must also be deeply rooted in changing our institutions to better support human rights and substantive democracy. This second story is a key element of BH’s uneven progress and difficulties and also shows us where we will need to focus next in the fight against hunger. Following on from these two stories, I use their lessons to think about the challenges and possibilities of food movements in the United States. As we have seen, BH is not a simple model that can be plunked down somewhere else without extensive contextualization. This chapter aims to offer some of this context in the case of the United States. It also offers some specific ideas as to what we need to do next in the United States and elsewhere. 175

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a comprehensive and multifaceted approach We have already extensively reviewed the first key element of BH’s significant if qualified successes: its application of all Five A’s (availability, accessibility, adequacy, acceptability, and agency). Although each A did not receive equal focus, all of them made their presence felt in BH’s program design. The programs focused particularly on accessibility, avoiding the historical overemphasis on availability and production. Programs such as ABasteCer, School Meals, School Gardens, Popular Restaurants, and the defunct Workers’ Convoy zeroed in on making food more economically and physically accessible to BH residents. Other programs, particularly those focused on education, helped give the populace access to and ownership of knowledge around nutrition, cooking, and food preparation. In this way, they contributed to adequacy, acceptability, and to a limited extent, agency. While such efforts can slide into technocratic and paternalistic impulses to “civilize” laborers, in BH they seemed to have aspired to a more liberatory ethos. The difference lies in whether students are treated as receptacles for information or as active and equal agents in their own education. Nevertheless, encouraging an egalitarian relationship with program beneficiaries and partners is a challenge in the face of existing power imbalances. While it was not the primary focus, availability was hardly ignored. Support programs for basic production, both within the city (e.g., urban agriculture) and in the surrounding rural areas, sought to secure sufficient healthy, fresh food for city residents while also supporting the security and livelihoods of area farmers. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the city’s efforts in this area were minor in comparison to the size of the local farm population and the challenges facing them. As currently practiced by the city, the support for accessibility for its citizens can also at times conflict with the food security and environmental demands of small family farmers in the landscape around BH. It is an ongoing weakness for the Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security (SMASAN) that production methods and prices for farmers receive only irregular and secondary concern. Even as its multifaceted approach is a strength, it is clear that some facets require increased attention, if SMASAN is to continue its progress in BH.

rights, agency, and substantive democracy Alongside its holistic approach to food security, SMASAN has long grounded many of its programs in a rights-based approach. The goal

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from the program’s early days was to recognize, at a city level, a right to food that its administrators (and social movement allies) saw as a vital part of the full suite of human rights. BH further built on the food security discourse of the time in ways that anticipated later national advancements. For one, thirteen years after SMASAN’s founding, Brazil passed the National Food and Nutritional Security Law of 2006. The Right to Food was added to Brazil’s constitution four years later (Rocha 2016a, 36–37). These legal innovations, and a newly mandated National Food and Nutrition Security Council (CONSEA), further reinforced SMASAN’s approach to the right to food as a foundational right; one that obligates government action to guarantee its realization. That said, BH’s success in developing a rights-based approach does not quite measure up to its advances in food accessibility. Despite the rhetoric repeated among SMASAN staffers and administrators related to the right to food and what SMASAN staffer Rubens called “a culture of food security,” I observed little mention of these ideas in my interactions with residents of the greater BH region. To be sure, numerous beneficiaries of and participants in SMASAN’s programs expressed appreciation for the secretariat, although this was often only after being asked about it. Education program staff and their students did sometimes articulate ideas about the right to food and a sense of “food citizenship” without being prompted, but even as SMASAN has definitively made a difference for many people, and shifted expectations and entitlements among the general populace, its democratic and agency-building elements remain underdeveloped. Rocha (2016b), for example, points out that many people still associate SMASAN’s programs with its larger and more established partners—such as the secretariats of education, commerce, or social services. And as we saw in chapter 3, SMASAN administrators admit that in their own conversations with beneficiaries, other secretariats and even private businesses are sometimes credited with SMASAN’s work. This is a matter of concern, and not just a matter of giving credit where credit is due, because as Rubens observed, “if there’s something wrong, who are they going to complain to? The population has a right to know [who in the government is working on this], so we need to be a little more daring and aggressive in our information . . . to show the population what’s happening in the city and who is doing it.” Put simply, SMASAN’s goals of realizing the right to food and empowering its population to embrace this right are as yet unmet, a gap of perhaps existential danger. The lawsuit demanding access to SMASAN’s programs mentioned in the Preface remains an exceptional case. Without

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recognition of the crucial place of food security as a set of rights in itself, and a corresponding comprehension of the importance of a government office dedicated to it, citizens will lack the information necessary to exercise their agency around the right to food. As Rocha (2016a, 33) put the matter: For those who do not know its history and do not recognize what it does, SMASAN seems superfluous. This puts in jeopardy its very existence as a municipal department, particularly at times of a change in local government, or during times of fiscal constraint. . . . While few people would question the existence and importance of traditional departments (education, health, and social services), the existence and importance of a “department of food and nutrition security” are always questioned, no matter how successful its programs have been. SMASAN constantly has to justify its existence and relevance, even after 20 years of exemplary policies and programs in food security.

This dynamic can be self-reinforcing—without recognition of SMASAN’s importance and history, citizens and civil society will likely miss opportunities to strengthen SMASAN internally and make it more effective in its mission. Rocha continues: “The lack of recognition of the importance and uniqueness of SMASAN is also reflected in the attitude of many of its own past directors. The directorship of a municipal department is a political appointment, and with the exception of SMASAN’s first director, Maria Regina Nabuco, other people appointed to head SMASAN throughout the years have not necessarily had any previous knowledge of food and nutrition security or any particular commitment to it” (2016a, 33–34). Rights and agency are left ill addressed across the food chain. In the previous chapter, I reviewed the limits of SMASAN’s ability to support the livelihoods of small local family farmers. Although some staff and administrators have clearly supported the goal of boosting farmer economic security, multiple barriers have stopped them from more widely expanding the benefits of their programs. The benefits to the farmers who do participate also seem to be variable and to have been potentially reduced over the past few years (Pratley 2012). In that period, some administrators with a direct commitment to this aspect of the programs have been replaced with others who either did not share that commitment or lacked an awareness of what it would take to fulfill it. Even within the city, we see that access to affordable and fresh food in lowincome neighborhoods has been an area of stubborn difficulty. The programs that are meant to serve the poorest and most marginalized, such

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as the Popular Basket and the defunct Workers’ Convoy, have suffered some of the more difficult tribulations in terms of continuity, quality, and access (Araújo and Alessio 2005; Rocha and Lessa 2009; Rocha 2016b). Given that deep poverty and homelessness still exist in BH, SMASAN programs that increase access to food through low-price venues are of limited help to those who cannot afford to pay at all. At the same time, programs such as the distribution of enriched flour (now powdered milk and cooking oil), School Meals, the Big Popular Basket, and the Popular Restaurants, do appear to have made a difference. The decreases in infant malnutrition and infant mortality, for instance, appear particularly dramatic in some of the poorest areas of BH. So while the poorest have assuredly not been guaranteed the full potential of their right to food, they have not been left out of the advancements that SMASAN (and Fome Zero) pioneered. To return to the evolving body of thought on hunger we reviewed in chapter 2, as well as the history of food security analysis in Brazil of chapter 3, it is clear that BH must strengthen not only its ability to guarantee the human rights of all its citizens, but must also specifically improve its efforts on agency, the fifth A. Citizens’ ability to directly stake claims upon and make demands of their government has been found to have important effects on antihunger programs’ effectiveness (e.g., de Janvry, Finan, and Sadoulet 2012). At the same time, in Brazil’s Fome Zero programs, various factors have limited poorer citizens’ recognition and action toward their rights, political agency, and food sovereignty (Morton 2015). It seems clear that, for both BH and Brazil as a whole, the progress in agency, or substantive democracy, is where the struggle against hunger must be strengthened next. There have already been some clear triumphs in BH and the creation of new democratic institutions. Specifically, BH hosts two deliberative bodies devoted to food security: the Municipal Council for Food and Nutrition Security (COMUSAN) and the School Meals Council. Membership in these councils mirrors that of CONSEA, which is legally mandated to consist of one-third governmental representatives and two-thirds from civil society. Focusing on direct participation by civil society, and with their foundation in local and national food security laws, these councils represent both the important progress BH has made in agency and the limits that it still faces. COMUSAN, formed in 2003, represents at least the second major attempt at a food policy council in BH. It was preceded by a similar Municipal Food Policy Council in the 1990s, but this attempt at incorporating civil society participation has been bluntly assessed to have

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“failed”; postmortems point to the fact that coordination between different governmental and civic actors was voluntary, and to the development of personality and political conflicts (Rocha 2016a, 37). Attendance at council meetings was low, particularly on the part of social movements, and upon a change in administration, the incoming secretary of SMASAN declined to preside over the organization, making it effectively inoperative (Araújo and Alessio 2005, 29–30; Nabuco and Souki 2004, 59). The second iteration of COMUSAN has faced challenges as well since re-formation, particularly the death of Maria Regina Nabuco, SMASAN’s founding secretary, who had been presiding over the council. Nabuco, from all reports, had shown a “real interest in amplifying popular [civil society] participation in the decisions of the Secretariat” and a dedication to making sure that civil society’s interests were effectively responded to by the government (Araújo and Alessio 2005). In other words, she had shown apparent commitment to fostering effective agency and substantive democracy. Although COMUSAN stopped meeting for eight months after her death, all was not lost. The council’s role in food security in BH had been reinforced at this point by the 2006 National Food and Nutritional Security Law, which mandated the creation of CONSEA. The law obliged all levels of government to contribute to realizing the right to food and strongly encouraged the formation of local and regional food policy councils. The national food security plan developed under the law formalized requirements for transparency and civil society– governmental coordination on the design, implementation, and monitoring of food security programs (Rocha 2016a, 36). These national shifts helped recenter both SMASAN and civil society’s role in securing the end to hunger in BH. There are other reasons for continued hope, despite the austerity promotion and regressive direction of Brazil’s current national politics. For the first time in SMASAN’s nearly twenty-five years of existence, the new mayor, Alexandre Kalil, elected in 2016, chose to dismiss most of the city government’s staff, totaling nearly three thousand people. This is not an uncommon move in Brazilian politics, but it was at best a confusing sign for the future of programs such as SMASAN. Some staff were hired back immediately, and the secretariat and its activities are being built up again as new staff are brought in. My contacts within SMASAN have reported that confusion and darkness are giving way to cautious hope, with the sense that Kalil is generally supportive of SMASAN. One remarked that “the new secretary comes from [the Secretariat of Social

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Policy] and has a lot of experience in public participation, councils, and social inclusion.” This might have contributed, they thought, to the fact that the civil society–government councils—the Municipal Council for Food and Nutrition Security (COMUSAN) and the School Meals Council—are, for the first time, included in the official organizational structure of SMASAN (see figure 5). All that said, COMUSAN and the similarly constituted School Meals Council are not of necessity egalitarian, or sufficiently so, to fully live up to the needs and ideals of agency, or to take advantage of the benefits of embeddedness (discussed in chapter 5). Nor are they always expressive of effective public–civil society collaboration. Recall from the previous chapter the importance of egalitarian social structures in Evans’s (1996) analysis of effective public–civil society collaborations. If “those whose nutrition does not allow them the surplus energy required to engage in politics should be considered a class—the disenfranchised” (Ribot 2014, 695), then SMASAN’s limits in reaching its poorest citizens represents a failure of not only accessibility, but also inherently a failure to provide agency, despite the presence of spaces of participation that are nominally open to all. At the same time, these limits recapitulate the importance of SMASAN’s comprehensive approach. Insofar as SMASAN continues to make progress in providing the otherwise disenfranchised the surplus energy necessary to be more politically involved without compromising their ability to survive, it improves the ability of its new civil society– governmental institutions to truly be forums for agency. Nevertheless, SMASAN alone does not and cannot be expected to provide all of the support and change necessary such that marginalized populations “have sufficient wealth beyond mere subsistence to enable the individual, household, group or community to walk away from daily labor long enough to engage in shaping the political economy that shapes their entitlements” (Ribot 2014, 695–96). This sort of true emancipation, in BH and beyond, will require more from all of us than one secretariat can provide.

modest proposals As much as the right to food and the renovation of spaces in which citizens can petition (and be heard by) their government can only help move BH towards emancipation, such advances are not the same as building egalitarian social structures, or providing the “sufficient wealth” that agency, emancipation, and substantive citizenship require. But if that

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is the case, am I simply defining agency as an impossible, unachievable goal? Beginning to End Hunger, as the book title implies, offers a sense of the ambition necessary. The rethinking and remaking of our institutions to provide universal agency may require deeper, larger-scale institutional changes. The good fortune is that many examples of steps towards a liberated food future already exist, as do numerous ideas to get there. These steps include both new ways of doing democratic practice (Carlson and Chappell 2015; Fung and Wright 2003) and building spaces and support for emancipatory agency. They call for a whole family of approaches that are in various stages of development, from participatory budgeting (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014), sortition (drawing lots to appoint citizens as public officials) (Landemore 2013), and deep democracy (Prugh, Costanza, and Daly 2000) to guaranteed basic income (Flowers 2016) and full employment guarantees (Paul, Darity, and Hamilton 2017). Although these ideas seem lofty, perhaps even far-fetched and difficult to achieve, the same could be said of the ideas around food security that developed only over many decades in Brazil. They came to flower in BH—yes, not perfectly, not without retrogression and advancement—and went on to bear fruit at the national level as well with Fome Zero. But recall that at one point, to return to a theme of the first chapter, we might have “known” that programs and institutions such as SMASAN and Fome Zero were politically impossible. We now know that to be untrue. Imagine what we might “know” tomorrow. The point is not that the above ideas are perfect or inherently emancipatory (see, e.g., Rogers 2016 on guaranteed basic income). The point is that there are many possible ways forward and many communities are making new paths by walking them. This is a fundamentally important part of change. In essence, the more ideas there are to implement our ideals, as the multiple streams approach (MSA) implies, the more likely our ideals will be implemented (Kingdon 2010). At the same time, it is also important that possible solutions become sufficiently developed and detailed such that practical implementation can be considered and groups can coalesce around common proposals. “Proposals that are suggested by only one person are not often retained as salient options” (Axelrod 1973 as cited in Kingdon 2010, 140). Both these dynamics were very much present in Brazil, where movements, scholar-activists, and the PT and allied political parties converged on a very specific set of policy program ideas, extensively mapped them out, and then, put them into practice.

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Given Brazil and BH’s experience, then, and the framework of the MSA, what can we say about the future of food and agriculture policy in the United States? Although the problems faced by the United States are very different from those in BH and Brazil, there is still no dearth of deep and abiding problems that challenge all residents—eaters and farmers alike. The underlying premise of this last chapter is that, using the tools of the MSA we saw applied to BH’s experiments, we can learn about the challenges and the potential paths forward for the nascent American food movement in its efforts to finally institutionalize food sovereignty in a country with more than enough resources to do so. The following section examines the situation in the United States in light of the examples and frameworks we have discussed throughout this book.

thinking about the u.s. system Although there is no simple formula that would allow us to re-create BH’s successes anew in the context of another country, the MSA gives some insights on some steps to take. Based on my own recent experiences in the (multiple) U.S. food movements, the book concludes with an MSA analysis of some of the issues at hand in the United States. This is not meant to be an analysis of how to enact a full Fome Zero/ SMASAN–style approach in the United States. Rather, I will look at some of the major issues that arose from each of the multiple streams in my own experience. Are there clues on where actors in the United States could go in order to move a progressive food agenda forward? We will almost certainly not achieve anything like a full-scale success the next time a major policy window opens in the United States (and perhaps not the time after that either). But we can see already the nascent institutions; the possible changes in rules, norms, and values; and the opportunities to create a just and sustainable future that is “more evenly spread.” From September 2013 to May 2016, I worked for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a nonprofit organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota. IATP is a thirty-year-old self-described “think- and do-tank” focusing on advocacy, research, reporting, and dissemination of scholarship and practical experiences relevant to food sovereignty, food justice, agroecology, farmer livelihoods, and fair trade. While at IATP, I was able to work with actors throughout the growing U.S. food movement, including organizations and networks such as the Food Chain Workers’ Alliance, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, FarmAid, the National Family Farm Coalition (which is also the North

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American secretariat of the international peasant farmers’ movement, La Vía Campesina), the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, Berkeley Food Institute, Food First, Rural Coalition, the Community Alliance for Global Justice, the Southeastern African-American Farmers’ Organic Network, and Get Our Act Together, among others. The Problems Stream in U.S. Food Systems To review, the problems stream is not primarily about whether a problem exists, but rather whether there is a significant focus on a given problem and a recognition that it requires government-led action. Three primary mechanisms for a problem getting on an action agenda are indicators, feedback, and focusing events. Numerical indicators of a problem make it easier to understand and more likely to be embraced by the public and policy makers, though the lure of quantitative measurement is, of course, not without its dangers (Scott 1998). As one would naturally suspect, problems that can be expressed with “big numbers” are often able to draw attention. Dramatic changes in existing indicators can do so as well. In the case of food and agriculture in the United States, the numerous potential problems occupying the attention of actors and policy makers in the food system are “unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/ environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high” (Pollan 2010). The negative indicators of the U.S. food system— diet-related disease and overconsumption of unhealthy foods, limited access to healthy food and the time and resources to make access meaningful, shockingly high levels of tenuous food security and numbers of food-insecure children, huge amounts of damage to both the environment and the bodies of agriculture workers consigned to work in the industrial system, and many other “externalities”—have been amply documented elsewhere and will not be recounted here (but see Fisher 2017; Steingraber 2010; Tegtmeier and Duffy 2004). Suffice to say that numerous indicators, numerical and qualitative, show a plethora of large-scale problems in the food system. But the attention and recognition of the problems of the U.S. food system, and the magnitude of said problems, have not been sufficient in generating significant, sustained, and coordinated pressure. “Policy windows” may be opening and closing, but the problems, policies, and politics streams in the U.S. food system seem to remain stubbornly separate. Attempts to reframe the

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problems of the food system around the questions of inequality, class, race, and the need to empower citizens in the face of corporate food interests also do not seem to have created the kind of “[jumping on the] bandwagon effect” that would consolidate the problem stream and make positive change much more likely. Another route to the recognition of a problem can be feedback on existing programs from citizens or government bureaucrats and administrators. Within the U.S. food system, however, multiple mechanisms block recognizing gaps in food sovereignty as a systematic problem per se. Current recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) in the United States are victims of rampant stigma and misconceptions (Khazan 2013; Delaney 2013), contributing to a commonly remarked-upon rift between antihunger advocates and other advocates for agrifood system reforms. Efforts to protect SNAP are folded into the fight against broader attacks on social welfare in the United States and for restructuring the U.S. Farm Bill (cf. Graddy-Lovelace 2017). This “omnibus bill” links farm support and environmental conservation programs with the U.S. food assistance programs. It is generally renewed every five years. The Farm Bill amplifies rifts between farmers, many of whom depend on its supports to maintain any kind of livelihood, and antihunger advocates, who need to preserve funding for beleaguered food assistance programs and who may still carry neo-productivist proclivities, seeking to keep food prices low, which further threatens farmer livelihoods (Wilson 2014). In informal conversations over the past two years, a number of observers have proposed that an acute crisis is what is needed to jolt problem recognition into gear. A disaster, say, the equivalent of a Flint water crisis in the area of food, is one type of focusing event that is widely and intuitively recognized as a potential juncture to create momentum for change. However, disasters alone are neither necessary nor sufficient for significant policy change. Focusing events can be powerful symbols that unite groups around a particular problem. The personal experiences of an influential public figure or policy maker can also help provoke action. One potential focusing event that stirred hope in many in the food movement was a series of meetings on antitrust campaigns held over the course of 2010 (Farm Aid 2010; U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ] 2012).1 The leader of one nonprofit, having worked in this area for decades, commented that she had really thought things were going to change this time. She wondered what could be done after so many groups from the food movement showed up for the antitrust battle.

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While the DOJ report on the antitrust meetings confirms a high level of interest and engagement—with 1,700 attendees at one workshop and over 18,000 public comments submitted—the report also points to two reasons the new attention in the problem stream did not open a window for change. First, the DOJ emphasized that it can challenge concentration only on narrow grounds of harming competition: “antitrust laws do not invest the Division with the authority to [take enforcement action] on non-competition grounds” (2012, 17). In other words, appeals to the effects of market concentration on environmental quality, public safety, market structure, and rural livelihoods do not fall within the reach of the law as the DOJ chose and the federal courts currently choose to interpret it. This perspective was also reinforced in private meetings I attended with NGO representatives and government officials, although the effects of industry lobbying and corporate power should not be ignored (Khan 2012). But another point is also important: while there was focused attention on the issue of antitrust, problem framing and recognition appears to have varied significantly among those involved. “Participants offered varied—and at times contradictory—accounts of the problems they face and the solutions they envision” (DOJ 2012, 2). Thus the superficially “focused” focusing event actually showed divergences in the problem framing by interested members of the public. Worse still, it exposed a lack of consensus on policy actions to take. A key element for a problem to gain recognition and be part of opening a window of opportunity is the “sense that a well thought out solution already exists” (Cairney and Jones 2016, 40). In other words, this is one place the policies stream can have a powerful effect on the semi-independent behavior of the problem stream. Where multiple possible policy solutions exist and are readily accessible, the problem they correspond to is somewhat paradoxically more likely to float to the “top” of the problem stream (Kingdon 2010). That is, a problem that hasn’t already had possible policy solutions float through the consciousness of policy makers or the public is less likely to be recognized as a problem, despite the fact that a problem without ready-made solutions arguably deserves more attention, not less, in order to help spur potential solutions. The Policies Stream in U.S. Food Systems From all accounts, the policy stream in the U.S. food movement is highly fragmented. Multiple scholars have documented this, including

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Eric Holt-Giménez and Yi Wang (2011), who propose four “trends/ movements” in the area of food justice in the United States: neoliberal, reformist, progressive, and radical. The solutions offered by policy specialists within each of these trends differ, often wildly, as is the case with regards to antitrust, as well. For his part, food writer Michael Pollan (2010) characterizes the U.S. food movement as “start[ing] out splintered,” listing fifteen distinct threads of policy advocacy as being “among” those prominent in the food movement. And even within the framing of concentration in the agrifood system alone, the five hearings held in 2010 led the DOJ to label the solutions envisioned “varied—and at times contradictory,” as we have seen. My experiences closely conform with these evaluations and point to other indicators of policy community fragmentation, including vigorous and continued debates over terms, phrases, and slogans. The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, which I worked with during my time at IATP, explicitly allies itself with international struggles, such as the work of the international small-scale farmers’ movement, La Vía Campesina. But this international context, and the phrase “food sovereignty,” are not well known in the United States. The term “food justice” is more common in the United States but competes with proposals from groups that may identify themselves as working on community food security, food democracy, new agrarianism, food safety, antihunger, Slow Food, agrarian citizenship, and consumer sovereignty (i.e., “voting with your fork”) (Holt-Giménez and Wang 2011; Carlson and Chappell 2015). This proverbial Kitchen of Babel is significant because having a common language can be an important factor, especially when different groups are actually advocating for similar ideas. That is, if there is a level of consensus among policy experts and yet their proposals use a different phrasing or lexicon, fragmentation can be maintained or deepened, as opposed to a virtuous cycle wherein sharing a common terminology not only indicates a level of integration but enhances it (Kingdon 2010, 120). All in all, the fragmentation seen in the U.S. food movement makes it more difficult to generate the kind of agenda stability and consensus that makes coupling the streams—and therefore achieving substantive policy change—more likely. This fragmentation helps aggravate a second challenge in the policies stream, which in turn can hamper problem recognition within the problems stream. The chance for a problem to rise high enough on the agenda that decisive action may be taken is “dramatically increased if a solution is attached” (Kingdon 2010, 143; emphasis in the original).

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Given that having a “worked-out” alternative to the status quo is a strong predictor of action, an absolutely key action for members of the food movement, particularly food sovereignty activists, is to create well-worked-out proposals. This need not be capitulation to the status quo: MSA research has shown the power of “softening up” by repeatedly exposing policy makers, allies, and opponents to potential solutions.2 And it is far from the case, of course, that there are no proposals for alternatives to the status quo—as we have discussed, there are arguably too many different proposals. But the experiences of BH and Brazil, and the ideas of MSA, all imply that U.S. food activists will need to converge and create what might crudely be called “shovel-ready” policy proposals, even (or perhaps especially) if they are radical ones, if we wish to spark further progress.3 In at least one case, the actions by members of the U.S. food movement have arguably been the opposite of what the MSA would indicate is likely to be effective. Specifically, the ideas of supply management and parity have long been “off the table” for discussion in polite company (Graddy-Lovelace and Diamond 2017). Briefly, supply management refers to policies meant to provide for some constancy in supply, and therefore prices, for a good (or service). In food, this has a logical role because of the well-known tendency for food production to consistently increase, creating oversupply and driving prices down below the cost of production, putting farmers out of business (De Schutter 2014; Ray, De La Torre Ugarte, and Tiller 2003). Parity’s complicated technical definition and history can be roughly translated to the idea that policies ought to regulate market forces such that farmers get the equivalent of a fair wage (Graddy-Lovelace and Diamond 2017; Shideler 1953). Leaving aside an analysis of the merit of these concepts, a number of actors in the food movement have expressed to me that advocating for them has fallen out of favor. They are viewed as intractable and opposed by too many interests, including policy makers. This is an important point. “Value acceptability” is a criterion for a solution rising in the policy stream. But by the same token, “softening up” is also an important process for making proposed solutions “acceptable.” That is, “getting [the larger public and policy communities] used to new ideas and building acceptance for their proposals. Then when a short-run opportunity . . . comes, the way has been paved, the important people softened up. Without this preliminary work, a proposal sprung even at a propitious time is likely to fall on deaf ears” (Kingdon 2010, 128).

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Keeping a policy idea “bubbling” in the policy primeval soup by continuing active discussion and development around it increases the likelihood of a major change based on that idea coming to pass in the long run. We need look no further than universal health care in the United States, a policy area examined in Kingdon’s original field research. Kingdon (2010, 6) points out that proposals on this theme date back at least to Teddy Roosevelt, and major pushes to enact health care reform failed to bring universal coverage into effect in the 1970s and 1990s. Based on his framework, however, Kingdon assessed President Obama’s attempts at actually enacting an overhaul as more likely to succeed than the attempt in the 1990s, in no small part because of greater consensus among the policy community, not to mention yet another round of softening up. Given a lack of unity on policy solutions, particularly the verboten proposals of supply management and parity, it would seem opportune for allies in the academic sector to take a significant role in codeveloping and analyzing possible, and possibly radical, proposals. The past two decades, with food policy advocates toning down their promotion of parity and supply management, could have been an opportunity for academics and movement allies to build a new consensus, as happened in the area of health care (Kingdon 2010), and in Brazil with regards to social policies. Some researchers and advocates have continued this work, but significant pushes to develop proposals and soften up policy makers have been lacking, even by think tanks that continue to support these ideas (Ray, De La Torre Ugarte, and Tiller 2003; Wise 2004; Wilson 2014). But the bottom line is that, with many policy solutions based on different problem framings and underlying values competing within the policy primeval soup, much more concerted investment may need to be made in creating either a large-scale united agenda or in driving uptake and consensus around smaller-scale proposals so as to build lasting and larger-scale coalitions. Lastly, policy entrepreneurs are often viewed as a very important part of the MSA and the mechanisms for advancing policy solutions towards passage. The idea of policy entrepreneurship appears throughout the political science literature. Such people are, empirically, important to making change happen, and are present in a wide and diverse array of cases in policy change. At the same time, the concept “seems to throw self-interested bureaucrats, NGO leaders, ‘thought leaders,’ organizers, politicians, business people, etc., all into the same bag” (A. Shattuck, personal communication).4 The concept risks elevating self-promoters,

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reinforcing hierarchies, and promoting an individualistic idea of entrepreneurship that is at odds with the emancipatory aims of agency. Must the idea of policy entrepreneurship be torn down in order to strengthen substantive democracy? As I will return to below, there may be ways to reconcile these important tensions. As the Reverend William Barber II argued in a presentation to FarmAid and its allies, in the 1970s, “progressives went from building a movement, to backing Messiah candidates” (2014a, 2–3), the problem is not that there is never a need for leaders, but rather that a sound strategy prepares many people to assume leadership, and builds this capability throughout local communities. A key element to maintaining the emancipatory potential of this strategy, however, is the creation of spaces, opportunities, and even pressure or social sanction such that leaders/entrepreneurs rotate in and out over time, both building broader capacity and decreasing hierarchy. This strategy has inherent challenges and dangers, to be sure, but approaches like participatory budgeting and citizens’ juries, and the rotating leadership of the international movement La Vía Campesina, show it can be done, and can be improved. As with all other elements of the MSA, the presence of policy entrepreneurs does not guarantee success. But a key insight of the MSA, I believe, is that their presence clearly makes change more likely. It would follow, then, that the more people in communities who have “sufficient wealth beyond mere subsistence . . . to walk away from daily labor long enough to engage in shaping the political economy” (Ribot 2014), the more possible “entrepreneurs” there may be. This would not only make change more likely, but to the extent that agency is truly extended to marginalized communities and individuals, it should make change more substantively democratic. The Politics Stream in the U.S. Food Movement Before diving into the last stream of the MSA as applied to the United States, it is worth noting two important insights from the MSA with regards to social change, particularly policy change. First, the attention that policy makers—or indeed any groups—give to any issue does not relate to an objective measure of its importance (Majone 1989, in Cairney and Zahariadis 2016). Second, social change systems are limited in their ability to process information (Ostrom, Cox, and Schlager 2014). That is, only so much deliberate, solution-oriented social change can

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happen at one time, because policy makers, institutions, communities, and individuals do not have the ability to completely scan all possible problems and policies, rank each one’s importance and feasibility, and carefully implement each solution. In other words, not everything can happen at once, and thus deliberate social change needs to act according to some sort of strategic, and inevitably imperfect, prioritization. Given these constraints, most issues can rise to the top of the political stream only after consensus building and softening up in the problem and policy streams. Important factors in the politics stream include policy makers’ perception of “national mood” (though note that their perceptions can be quite different from citizens’ actual opinions); changes in political officeholders, and thus changes in priorities; changes in the ideological or partisan distribution among policy makers; and interest group pressure. In the case at hand, policy makers may already perceive a changing “national mood” around food, with its growing prominence in the national conversation. But as is amply clear from the disparate views within the nascent food movement, there is nothing like a consensus within the national mood around the problems facing our food system or how to address them. And while there are political advocates for food justice policies within various U.S. government agencies, the dominant ideology of existing and likely administrations and congressional members is significantly constrained by the power of “pro-agriculture members of Congress, bureaucrats, and powerful interest groups—like grain giant Cargill—which collectively hold a jurisdictional monopoly on [agrifood] policy outputs” (Smith and Williams 2009). My experiences, and the current research literature, identify a gap in coordinated interest group pressure from food movement members, which is clearly implied by the ten to fifteen (or more) threads of advocacy and policy foci identified by Pollan (2010) and Holt-Giménez and Wang (2011). Further, there are voices in the conversation that could be classified as “pseudoadvocates” in the terminology of the MSA. For example, many proposals that fall under what Holt-Giménez and Wang term “neoliberal” and “reformist” tendencies echo Kingdon’s (2010, 162) description of “Astroturf” groups that “are not genuinely interested in pushing the cause. They advocate their own plans in the event . . . that an issue of concern to them becomes a serious threat to their interests.” Similarly, the MSA predicts that, as each of the streams evolves semi-independently from the others, we will sometimes see a dynamic where advocates for certain solutions “search for” problems or even create problems to solve (Zahariadis 2014). This seems to be

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the case in much of agrifood system discourse, particularly in terms of productivism and biotechnology, which seem to be promoted as solutions to problems in agrifood systems, almost without regard to what problem is being discussed (Buttel 2005; Chappell 2016; DaCunha and Nee 2016). A final thought about the politics of the political stream. Food issues clearly cross many jurisdictions and issue boundaries: environmental issues, farmer livelihoods, hunger and food access, labor conditions and livelihoods, human and environmental well-being in rural communities, food safety, and animal welfare, to name a few. Even solely in terms of antitrust and concentration in agrifood systems, legal jurisdiction is divided between the DOJ, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Federal Trade Commission. This is relevant because multiple overlapping jurisdictions can either spur or inhibit action. Action tends to be spurred when an idea is “hot” and people are eager to jump on a popular bandwagon. Actors will compete with one another to assert their ability to take action on the problem at hand. However, overlapping jurisdictions for a problem can also diminish the chances of real action: “All of the participants have a stake in preserving current sources of funding and current jurisdictions, which makes the chances of a more integrated approach quite remote” (Kingdon 2010, 157). Agrifood is certainly as open to such self-interested dynamics as any other system.

where does this leave the u.s. food movement? The complexity and changing interactions of the American policy process mean that accurate policy predictions will be limited to the system level. . . . Nonlinearity, nonnormality, interdependencies, and high levels of aggregation for empirical data mean that clear causal chains and precise predictions will work only in some cases and during some times. —Baumgartner, Jones, and Mortensen (2014, 91)

The MSA framework is inherently probabilistic. Some argue it is only really applicable as post hoc analysis. Here, in the face of that expectation, I use the approach to characterize the current state of the U.S. food movement and, not to be cruel about it, project some of its likely imminent failures. My observations are not from formal research, but rather from my personal involvement in food activism over the past decade plus. That said, I think there are a number of lessons to draw from the exercise in pursuing the goal of institutionalizing food sovereignty in the United States.

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One takeaway is that food sovereignty is competing with numerous other discourses and problem framings in the U.S. context, which makes it difficult to achieve consensus and high priority status within any of the streams, much less to join the streams together in a window of opportunity. This is to be expected to a certain extent. Food sovereignty is a relatively new term, and its implications and possible shapes are still being actively debated in all sectors, from academia to governments and international organizations. On the other hand, the notion has elements of holistic analysis that might help to draw seemingly disparate narratives together, particularly environmental harm from agrifood systems, concerns for rural livelihoods, and creating diversified and more locally based food systems (cf. Chappell and Schneider 2016). The MSA implies that far more important than using the “right” framework is finding one able to generate and encompass greater integration and consensus among policy communities and advocates. There are many possible ways to attempt this, but in my experience the resources dedicated to integrating perspectives are woefully limited in comparison to funds for a variety of “activities as usual.” Further, the sheer number of actors in the food movement creates significant competition for funding and seems to create incentives for every group to create their own framework, problem definition, and recommended solutions as a means to prove their value as a distinct entity, rather than simply saying “we are part of the consensus with the following other groups.” A similar dynamic seems to be in play in academia, where simply saying “me too” is no path to funding success, and where publishing success depends to a greater or lesser extent on producing something “new.” Even simple replication studies in natural sciences, a basic element of the modern scientific method, are woefully underfunded and underpublished given the incentives for “novelty.” That may not characterize all agrifood system research, of course. Nonetheless, dominant institutions reward such “novelty” at the cost of apparent unity. It is hard to get funding for the time and resources to simply “show up” for allies, and it is hard to prove you’re the kind of entrepreneur who should receive continued funding if a major part of your work is, for a time, mainly focused on showing up as part of a growing consensus. But if we take the MSA seriously, saying the same things with the same words (when and where we are in agreement) is an extremely powerful part of building momentum and change: “The striking feature in the interviews [with members of a united policy community] was that [they] spontaneously produced an explicitly common paradigm, using exactly the same

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terminology. . . . Such a paradigm not only indicates an integrated community, but it also enhances the integration” (Kingdon 2010, 120). While the idea makes some part of my U.S.-raised individualistic sensibilities recoil a bit, this kind of consensus building is incredibly powerful. Efforts at change without this consensus perpetuate unstable, fragmented policy systems where all progressive interests are less likely to be advanced. To use a problematic phrase, it is perhaps true that “there is no alternative” to building this kind of consensus (or perhaps, “co-sensus”— where there is not complete uniformity of opinion, but rather, consent for action given even while the reservations of some members are recorded and afforded respect). Consensus and common struggle are inevitably temporary. But based on the dynamics seen in Brazil, and the dynamics laid out in the MSA, the key is not perpetual unity, but rather building the trust, understanding, and true allyship that allows spaces of consensus and consent to be quickly built when policy windows present themselves. For example, Brazilian political scientist Ana Maria Doimo (1995, 66–67) examined the post-1970s social movements of Brazil, pointing out the vital strength that arose when many groups that were focused on different social reforms were able to create a common “ethical-political” field. While she presumed “a certain predisposition to participation,” continued participation and effectiveness were “advanced by interactive connections between certain groups and institutions, [that also] generate regular connections between, and changes within, these groups’ demands and actions,” (1995, 66–67, emphasis added). The ongoing connections between the social movement groups often took place out of sight of researchers, such that (Doimo proposes) a significant amount of movement action in post-1970s Brazil was labeled as “spontaneous,” when in reality the actions were deliberate and intentional. Doimo also addressed the classic conflicts over “inside” and “outside” strategies. She proposed that social movements involved in direct action actually have two different manifestations. One she described as “expressive-disruptive,” wherein direct action and protest disrupt the normal operations of the current system and delegitimize it in favor of radical change. The other she called “integrative-incorporative,” wherein many members of a movement join government and government-aligned agencies in order to oversee implementation of the movements’ proposals (Doimo 1995, 69 inter alia). Doimo argues for a certain inevitability of this shift, as institutionalizing new policies requires, well, institutions. Few large-scale movements seek to build all such institutions from

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scratch. Further, those involved with movements often have the most pertinent expertise to foster the changes demanded by the movements. On the other hand, the inevitable compromises involved in working within established institutions also usually entail giving up or deprioritizing certain demands. Thus essential elements may intentionally or inadvertently be left out of the institutionalization process. Or as Reverend Barber (2014b) puts it: “Everybody can’t go inside the belly of the beast because the belly will contaminate you. It has its own acids . . . the belly is designed to dissolve you. . . . So somebody has to be able to operate on the belly. . . . that’s an important role.” He further admonished the “one moment” mentality and viewing electoral politics and voting for the “right” person as the ultimate end of the action. If we were to combine the MSA, Doimo, and Reverend Barber, an alternate way to look at inside/outside strategies is to seek to build movements with the infrastructure to produce policy entrepreneurs “indigenous” to affected communities, as I discussed above. The generation of a constant stream of involved advocates, some of whom focus on expressive-disruptive actions, others on integrative-incorporative, undermines the implicit messianic connotations of the concept of policy entrepreneurship. Indeed, the MSA acknowledges this to a significant degree, recognizing that the ability to be a successful policy entrepreneur is not simply about personality, but rather about a combination of personal characteristics, location, and circumstances. Kingdon (2010) likens it to surfers waiting for the right wave: even the best surfer cannot bring on a wave, but when a wave does come, the surfer’s skill level becomes critically important. Or as sociologist Duncan Watts (2011) has written, Thinkers like Le Bon and Tolstoy and Berlin . . . lead us to a radically alternative hypothesis of social change: that successful movements succeed for reasons other than the presence of a great leader, who is as much a consequence of the movement’s success as its cause. Explanations of historically important events that focus on the actions of a special few therefore misunderstand their true causes, which are invariably complex and often depend on the actions of a great many individuals whose names are lost to history. Interestingly, in the natural world we don’t find this sort of explanation controversial. When we hear that a raging forest fire has consumed millions of acres of California forest, we don’t assume that there was anything special about the initial spark. Quite to the contrary, we understand that in context of the large-scale environmental conditions—prolonged drought, a buildup of flammable undergrowth, strong winds, rugged terrain, and on so—that truly drive fires, the nature of the spark itself is close to irrelevant.

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Yet when it comes to the social equivalent of the forest fire, we do in effect insist that there must have been something special about the spark that started it.

If we in the U.S. food movement and those seeking to support food sovereignty viewed the challenges before us in something like this light, we could essentially invest in preparing and creating the circumstances for change. One part of this is getting more “surfers” in place—allying and supporting ever more community members to have the opportunity to be policy entrepreneurs both inside and outside of existing dominant institutions. Watts’s fiery analogy aside, preparing the overall situation for change makes that change more likely to happen, decreases the importance of that “one right person,” and moves us away from what Barber called the “one moment” mentality (2014b). We will need to build a tolerance for the idea that not even the best surfers get up on every single wave. The point is to have many people prepared to try repeatedly, with others lined up to take the place of those who tire or fall—trying and practicing new tactics, until circumstances come together into what will post hoc appear to be the “one moment” (or “spark” of seemingly spontaneous action) but is really the result of many moments, over many attempts, made by and with many people. In important ways, these many food futures are already here. The institutions we need to end hunger, in BH, in Brazil, in the United States, and beyond, are even now in practice in some places. We have countless examples, pioneers, and communities that are making new paths by walking them (Chappell 2017). We can scale out these approaches to incorporate more than proof-of-concepts, model communities, or seemingly isolated cases. By developing approaches rooted in a full appreciation of human rights and in substantive democracy and citizenship, we can also engage in large-scale conversions respecting, indeed amplifying, local communities’ food sovereignty and agency, building out larger institutions aimed at ending hunger across our schools, cities, nationstates, and international collaborations. We must remember that even the most necessary of institutions have, at some point, started out as a contingent idea shared by a small group of people. These norms, rules, traditions, and values—including the institutions of the nation-state itself, human rights, international law, public education, democracy, egalitarianism, marriage equality, gender equality, racial equality, food security, food justice, and increasingly food sovereignty—now influence and shape billions of the world’s people, their behavior, expectations, and dreams.

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A food sovereign and food secure future is not evenly distributed. It is not even easily apparent. But it is there. Not all of the institutions we need for the future will be new. Almost none of them, as BH illustrates, will be created anew from whole cloth. None will work without adjustment and further evolution. But somewhere (and everywhere), we can see spaces and communities we can support, ally with, and build with—in the village councils of indigenous groups, in the human rights think tanks, among new politicians and old ones, in an urban community of gardeners, in a network of black food security thinkers, in the coordination of a growing international movement—the “new institutions” we need to overcome the great problems of the day may already exist. The seeds of a world without hunger are present. Not every seed will germinate, and not every shoot will become a sapling, nor every sapling a full-grown tree. But we must support, deliberate, debate, and nurture the seeds of our future institutions that already exist.

listening to our food futures Several years ago, members of the Cornell University students’ New World Agriculture and Ecology Group (NWAEG) and I met with staff of the Southside Community Center in Ithaca. Jemila Sequeira, a social worker, advocate for food dignity, and then vice-president of the center, was one of the people we spoke with—to think through how NWAEG and the center could work together. At one point, sitting back from the conversation between the students and the center staff, I thought to myself that there was a real enthusiasm and openness to working with us on the part of the staff. That contrasted with the critiques of university-community partnerships that Sequeira had voiced at a NWAEG-sponsored event the previous year. She had been critical of university staff and students “helicoptering” in to supposedly help the local community, but usually, in her view, without truly engaging with or respecting the community. I jumped back into the conversation at a pause to ask the center staff why they were so willing to work with us, with their limited resources and time. I was glad they were, of course, but why did they trust us enough to invest their time and open their center to us, when they previously had expressed wariness about partnering with the university? Without missing a beat, Jemila, who has since become a dear friend, looked at each of us in turn: “Because you all listen.”

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Those four words capture both how easy and how hard it is to work on what matters. It is no small thing to listen to others such that they feel heard—to hear their meaning in the context of their experiences and not just the surface of their words. This sort of listening requires one to stop and devote oneself to engaging with others as equal fellow human beings; someone whose priorities matter at least as much as your own; someone who may have something to say that is different from what you expect, or want, to hear. It is usually difficult to build the trust that, having listened to people from another community, you will truly work with them, rather than “at” them, to engage in conversations and work that matter and come out of their experience and not just your own agenda. It is as difficult to truly “hear” as it is to act on this responsibility. But this is what the case of BH and the framework of the MSA tell us we must pursue if we are to end hunger. While the voices of those who have been marginalized—particularly small-scale food producers and all those disadvantaged by poverty and inequality—must be given, or must take, the platforms upon which they can be heard, we have to make sure at the same time that those of us involved in the more technical literature or the fine points of public policy are listening. What is more, we must dedicate ourselves to supporting and expanding spaces where we can truly listen (and learn lessons that are just as important as any of the lessons from peer-reviewed literature). Brazil saw such an accumulation of understanding leading up to SMASAN: from Josué de Castro’s analyses and efforts in 1932 to the implementation and then dismantling of the Brazilian Social Security Food Service in the 1940s; the post-1970s social movements; the National Constitutional Assembly of 1986–1988; the Citizens’ Action Movement; the thousands of state–civil society–business citizens’ councils; the consolidation of the Workers’ Party’s broad agenda; the formation, dissolution, and reinstitution of regional and national food security councils; and finally BH’s SMASAN in 1993, which was followed by Fome Zero in 2004 and the Constitutional Right to Food in 2010. And now, as of April 2017, even with regressive if embattled President Michel Temer and his allies seeking to limit spending on social programs, including Fome Zero, we should remember that the progress in the battle against hunger in Brazil saw many setbacks. Similarly, despite the threat the current U.S. administration and Congress offers to the healthcare programs implemented under former President Obama, we should remember the decades of ebb and flow in the problems, policies, and politics streams

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Trust

Level of communication

Level of cooperation

Net benefit

Reciprocity

figure 8. Relationships in repeated social dilemmas. Reprinted by permission from D. Cole, “Advantages of a Polycentric Approach to Climate Change Policy,” Nature Climate Change 5, no. 2 (2015): 114–18. Copyright Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

that led to the new health care program being passed in the first place. Setbacks, even serious ones, can be surmounted. What does BH mean for Brazil moving forward as for the rest of us? Different parts of civil society came together after the dictatorship to create a common agenda, yes, but it is also true that trust and reciprocity were already forming across society. The dictatorship was formative not just for spurring so many people to action. In the face of exile and persecution, leftist scholars and activists such as Josué de Castro, Hebert de Souza, and many members of the Workers’ Party persisted in their work nonetheless. Their commitment to listening and advocacy despite often heavy personal costs both burnished their reputations and solidified trust among other social actors for change (see figure 8). The value of putting yourself on the line for the well-being of others should not be underestimated. There is a lot of space, of course, between celebrating being sued, as Rubens chuckled about in the preface, and being exiled for your beliefs. But both speak of a commitment that flies firmly in the face of the we bono fallacy around which food policy is pursued only at others’ expense. And so as I think about the importance of bringing about a new reality with new institutions capable of ending hunger—in BH and beyond, including the United States, the proverbial belly of the beast—I see the “good-news stories, pockets of reality that could be seeds of a wider vision” (Meadows 1996). The future, unevenly distributed as it may be, is also firmly present, whether it be in organizations such as Portland’s Growing Gardens, SoulFire Farm, La Vía Campesina, or the beats and flow laid down by the youth of North Minneapolis’s Appetite For Change. People are showing their commitment to a new world and

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new ways of new futures. We can see these initial steps along the path not as isolated efforts, but as multiple manifestations of a world where broader visions are already becoming reality. It is down to all of us to end hunger. The work will be extremely difficult, but as so much evidence, peer-reviewed and otherwise, now shows us, ending hunger is possible.

Abbreviations

ABC

ABasteCer, or “To Supply.” Also stands for Alimentos a Baixo Custo: “Foodstuffs at Low Cost”

BH

Belo Horizonte

CEASAMinas

Centros de Abastecimento de Minas Gerais: Food Supply Centers of Minas Gerais State

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America

COMUSAN

Conselho Municipal de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional: Municipal Food and Nutritional Security Council

CONSEA

Brazilian National Food and Nutritional Security Council

CP

Cestão Popular: the “Big Popular Basket” program

CSA

Community-supported agriculture

DR

Direto da Roça: the “Straight from the Countryside” program

EA

Amartya Sen’s entitlements approach

EMATER

Empresa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural: Public Enterprise for Technical Assistance and Rural Extension

FAD

Food availability decline

FED

Food entitlement decline

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FZ

Fome Zero: Brazil’s “Zero Hunger” programs

GHGs

Greenhouse gases

IATP

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

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Abbreviations

ICCPR

1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

ICSECR

1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

IFAD

International Fund for Agricultural Development

LVC

La Vía Campesina: The Peasants’ Way

MDS

Ministério de Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome da República do Brasil: Brazilian National Ministry of Social Development and Zero Hunger

MSA

Multiple streams approach

MST

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra: Landless Rural Workers’ Movement

PAA

Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos da agricultura familiar: Family Farm Food Purchase Program

PNAE

Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar: National School Meals Program

PT

Partido dos Trabalhadores: Brazilian Workers’ Party

PUS

Persistent under-supply

SAPS

Serviço de Alimentação da Previdência Social: Social Security Food Service program

SMAB

Secretaria Municipal de Abastecimento: Municipal Secretariat of Food Supply

SMASAN

Secretaria Municipal Adjunto de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional: Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security

SOFI

FAO’s State of Food Insecurity in the World annual report

UDHR

1948 international Universal Declaration of Human Rights

USDA

United States Department of Agriculture

WHO

World Health Organization

Notes

preface 1. Pseudonyms are used throughout the book for interviewees and others present during my participant observations, except in cases where a public official was speaking in an official capacity, or permission has been granted to quote them directly. 2. In addition to documents available through the municipal webpage (http:// portalpbh.pbh.gov.br/pbh/) and the official city newsletter O Diário Município, I made use of hard copies of documentation shared with me, with administrative permission, by key informants within the secretariat. Appropriate IRB approval was obtained for all human subjects aspects of this research; Application UMIRB B04–00006385-I. 3. Here, as throughout the book, translations are by the author, unless otherwise noted.

chapter 1 1. Alam’s coinage and focus, strictly speaking, was on the “Majority World”: a collective term for the so-called Less-Developed Countries. Correspondingly, I use “Minority World” to collectively describe the world’s richer countries (i.e., the Industrialized Nations). 2. In fact, “an asshole optimist” is another possible way to translate “otimista babaca.” 3. Further, the figures were never meant to be normative goals (Tomlinson 2013). They reflected what modelers considered a likely, but not necessarily desirable, scenario. And such an increase “would not result in ‘food security’ for all . . . with just over 290 million people still undernourished in 2050” projected by the same modeled scenarios (Tomlinson 2013, 85). 203

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4. Which is to say nothing of the units of food they used. Rather than calories or weight, the unit is dollars (as pointed out by both Tomlinson 2013 and Boucher 2015). Suffice it to say, dollars are not a sensible unit to use to measure how much food might be needed to end hunger, as Alexandratos and Bruinsma themselves point out (2012, 7). 5. Our population growth rates have been similarly variable, and also depend on the scale examined. In other words, there are no particularly compelling reasons to view human population growth rate as being constantly or inevitably exponential (Graham and Boyle 2002). 6. This is not hyperbole. History reveals multiple examples of coercive control of population justified as a necessity for “their own good” or for the good of the environment. This includes the well-documented policies of the British in India, which greatly increased death tolls and suffering there, to programs of compulsory sterilization in India (Minkler 1977), and in U.S.-controlled Puerto Rico (Mass 1977). 7. The USDA definition of a household suffering from low food security is a household having “difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources,” and very low food security indicates disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake during the year for one or more household members (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2016, v). 8. Estimates vary. Fischer et al. (1991) estimated that 15% of food crosses international borders, while MacDonald et al. (2015) estimated that traded foods represent ~13% of agricultural land use. Data from 2012/13 gives a similar result (16.9%) when calculated by weight and averaged across eight major food categories (author’s calculations based on FAO 2014). Among an additional ten heavily traded food items (including coffee, tea, and cacao), an average of 9.5% crosses international borders (author’s calculations based on FAO 2009b/2016). 9. The total range for the forty countries is 87–150%. However, the figures are based on three-year averages, and thus do not address the important elements of hunger represented by year-to-year and seasonal fluctuations. 10. That said, there are many exciting and important efforts under way. Looking at various possibilities, Lappé and Collins (2015, 43) conclude that “cutting food waste by half seems like an eminently achievable goal.” 11. Although estimates of waste at all points in the chain, from harvest to household, are in dire need of improved data collection and analysis (Parfitt, Barthel, and Macnaughton 2010). 12. See also similar calculations in Lappé and Collins (2015, 42–44). 13. Besides the brief critique of seeing the projections of 60–70% as predicted food needs earlier in the chapter, it is worth noting that most of these estimates are based entirely on estimating the future food market size. That is, these projections measure future food production in dollars of food, which has no good relationship to food security (Wise 2013; Boucher 2015). 14. For the ideas underlying this point, I thank my friend Ann Evans Larimore, Professor Emerita of Geography and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She has been tireless, and quite correct, in insisting that all conversations about population size include consideration of the issues of gender, rights, and power (e.g., email to the author, dated May 28, 2014).

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15. Cf. environmental scholars Michael Nelson and John Vucetich (2009), who note: “All citizens have a moral obligation to actively promote in their society that which they are justified in thinking is right or good and to actively oppose that which they are justified in thinking is wrong or bad. Consequently every scientist has an obligation to be a just and transparently honest advocate. . . . When scientists reject advocacy as a principle, they reject a fundamental aspect of their citizenship. Rejecting one’s responsibility as a citizen is unethical” (1098–99). 16. Though I should draw attention here to geographer Julie Guthman’s Weighing In (2011), which is an important corrective to oversimplified and individualistic analyses of the “obesity epidemic.” 17. Effective demand is, roughly speaking, the desire for something paired with the resources to acquire it. This means that you can effectively send signs of your demand to “the market.” On the other hand, those with little or no money make for an unattractive consumer base, no matter how much they might want and need food: their needs and demands are effectively silenced in markets. 18. Though Smith and Haddad focus on childhood stunting, there are good reasons to think of child stunting and malnutrition as informative proxies for overall food security; see Smith and Naiken (1998), and Lappé and Collins (2015). 19. Dietary diversity itself is, in fact, also tied strongly to higher food security, separate from food availability (Smith and Haddad 2015; Headey and Ecker 2013). 20. For some number of farmers, this may have been a voluntary choice. But we should not overlook that other interests were at work as well (Ritchie and Ristau 1986; Pollan 2006). 21. The first edition was published in 1984.

chapter 2 1. There are multiple critiques of standard measures of overweight and obesity, including the possibility that researchers have severely underestimated the effects of chemicals called “obesogens.” A number of synthetic chemicals potentially belong to this class, including some pesticides. See Guthman (2011) and Grens (2015) on obesogens. Singer-Vine (2009) outlines the history of body mass index measurement and its caveats. 2. Naturally, the interactions between disease, poverty, and food security are multiple and complex; only a rudimentary picture is painted here. For a more complete analysis, see Ansell et al. (2009). 3. On nitrogen fertilizer, see Lassaletta et al. (2014). On simplified systems, agricultural pests, and pesticides, see Lundgren and Fausti (2015) and Meehan and Gratton (2015). For a calculation of the costs (and benefits) of pesticide use, see Bourguet and Guillemaud (2016). 4. The FAO (2015c) estimates that the environmental costs of current agricultural practices for eight of the most important agricultural commodities may be nearly US$3 trillion a year. That is, such costs are equal to more than 100% of the supposed value of the crops and livestock produced.

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5. Interestingly, alternative narratives have a long pedigree as well. Some British and Chinese officials, separately but in parallel, offered the point of view that “the famines were not food shortages per se,” but rather were “complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought crop failure” (Davis 2001, 18–19). 6. Duh. 7. As explained in the Introduction, the we bono fallacy proposes that the greater the extent a line of reasoning places burdens or costs on others, or maintains or improves a beneficial status quo for its proponent, the more likely this reasoning is to be incomplete or incorrect. 8. Neo-productivism has been previously used by various scholars to describe at least four partially conflicting types of “new productivism” (Burton and Wilson 2012, 67). My use of it here could be fit into the typology of Burton and Wilson as a fifth distinct type. 9. Extensive research demonstrating the presence of various agricultural treadmills has been conducted since Cochrane’s seminal 1958 piece (reprinted in 2003). See, for example, Binimelis, Pengue, and Monterroso (2009), Drinkwater and Snapp (2007), Jorgenson and Kuykendall (2008), Levins and Cochrane (1996), Mascarenhas and Busch (2006), Russell (2001), and Stone (2011). 10. For further unpacking of these dynamics, see Barrett (2013), and Demarest’s critique (2015). See Pollan (2010) and Freedman and Lind (2013) on the upside-down Fordism of the “low wage social contract.” 11. My thanks to Suman Sahai for reiterating this point to me. Perhaps the most stunning example of this reality is the viscerally evocative headline from Amy Waldman’s (2002) New York Times story: “Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots.” 12. The Green Revolution refers to a period of rapid growth in (monocultural) crop productivity as a result of the development of technical packages typically made up of hybrid crop varieties, increased fertilizer and pesticide inputs, and irrigation. 13. Wisman (2013) estimates that “productivity increased by 90 percent between 1973 and 2008, [whereas] average household income increased by about 15 percent,” which he points out, “for a 35-year period is not far from full wage stagnation.” Mishel, Gould, and Bivens (2015) calculated that between 1973 and 2013, productivity grew over eight times more than wages. 14. The nuances and socioeconomic contradictions of capitalism inherent in these dynamics are ably examined in Wallace and Kock (2012). 15. Fordism’s basic logic can be described as “an institutionalized compromise between organized labour and big business whereby workers accept management prerogatives in return for rising wages” (Jessop 2016). 16. But see Braverman (1974) for the classic heterodox analysis. 17. For an overview of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor pressure for better conditions and wages in the United States, see Zinn (2005, 253– 96, 321–58, inter alia). 18. It is additionally possible that the higher prices and wages could also stem agricultural expansion, by making it possible to make more of a living on less land, but this conjecture remains to be fully explored.

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19. The analysis in the 2015 SOFI otherwise largely relies on “child underweight” measures to describe progress made in reducing hunger. This seems to be out of line with most recent assessments of best practice, which indicates child stunting is a better indicator of child malnutrition (Smith and Haddad 2015). 20. Lappé and Collins (2015, 16) also point to World Health Organization data estimating that at least two billion people are often deficient in at least one essential nutrient, which can lead to nontrivial health problems. 21. While a full exploration of this is beyond our present purposes, it is important to maintain a distinction between an assertion of a collective moral obligation to address inequalities from which one benefits—the converse of we bono reasoning—and an assessment of personal blame or guilt, which does not necessarily spur action or obligation to address current and historical inequalities. 22. Although I have treated FED and the entitlement approach interchangeably here, Devereux (2001) offers a more nuanced take. 23. This possibility was acknowledged by Sen, and is examined in Edkins (1996: the source of the phrase “entitled to starve”). 24. As defined by Rocha (2007, 16), a public good is one that “once available . . . can be simultaneously enjoyed by many people. . . . it is very difficult to prevent people from using them, even those who have not paid for them. . . . Free markets fail to provide an efficient quantity of public goods because these goods tend to create very high beneficial externalities (as many people can enjoy them at the same time) that cannot be captured by private markets.” 25. Based on definitions in FAO (2006). 26. Though to hear Patel reconsider the possibility of being “food secure in prison,” see Patel, Philpott, and McInroy (2015). 27. Based on Rocha (2007), Chappell, Sears, and Moore (2011), and Centre for Studies in Food Security (2016). 28. Personal communication from C. Rocha to the author via email, dated August 21, 2008. 29. Here I am using “winning,” “losing,” and “settling” in the narrow neoclassical economic sense, where anyone giving up any amount of resources is a “loser” and anyone gaining resources a “winner,” regardless of any net gains or losses for society as a whole. A change resulting in a “win-settle” outcome is an “efficient” outcome from an economic point of view, whereas direct redistribution of any kind is a “win-loss,” and is therefore by (this) definition inefficient. As statistician Cosma Shalizi (2009) quipped, “Restoring stolen goods to their rightful owners is not Pareto-improving” (that is, economically “efficient”). 30. Also sometimes expressed as “expanding the pie,” as opposed to changing how the pie is divvied up. The first aphorism ignores the quandary that a rising tide lifts all boats because and only because any increase in water is exactly equally distributed across a water body; you can’t pile water. And a bigger pie necessarily takes more resources, which had to come from somewhere (or somebody), notwithstanding economic myths around the spontaneous creation of “value” (Daly 2007). 31. Though even this can be debated, on both Fordist and other grounds.

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32. Ecological economist Herman Daly (2007) points out that “because someone is made worse off in any redistribution . . . neoclassical economists would disallow redistribution as a source of net social benefit” (92). 33. The meaning of campesino/peasant as used by LVC, and in Spanish more generally, is closer to the word’s origins meaning “person of the land” than its associations in English with being downtrodden or backwards. 34. The quote regarding commodities is from Levins and Lewontin (1985, 285–86). 35. All five points, except where otherwise noted, draw their quotes or are paraphrased from Akram-Lodhi (2015, 564). 36. For example, Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe (2010).

chapter 3 1. These figures are from data for the periods 1993–2015 and 1996–2015 for child hospitalization and under-five mortality, respectively, and retrieved from Prefeitura Municipal de Belo Horizonte (PMBH) (2016). 2. Data are from the years 1993–2015 and 1998–2015 for infant mortality and diabetes hospitalization, respectively, and retrieved from PMBH (2016). The figure shows that Brazil as a whole saw steady declines in infant mortality in this period. BH, however, saw a much steeper decline between 1994 and 1995, shortly after the creation of SMASAN, and went from 22% below the national average in 1993 to 29% below the national average in 2015. 3. BH remained first in fruit consumption, but fell to ninth in vegetable consumption in 2008/09 (IBGE 2010). 4. Specific accolades include a Public Administration and Citizenship Award from the Getûlio Vargas and Ford Foundations; recognition as a Best Practice from UN-Habitat, and a Future Policy Award by the World Future Council (dos Santos 2000; UN-Habitat n.d.; World Future Council 2009). 5. See Lappé and Lappé (2002), Lappé (2010), Mendonça and Rocha (2015), Pratley and Dodson (2014), Rocha (2001, 2016a), Rocha and Lessa (2009), and Shein (2007). 6. Estimates of the number of Brazilians in poverty range from 5.8 million to 18 million (3–9% of the population) for 2013 (UNDP 2015). But as anthropologist Jason Hickel’s (2016) polemic argues, such figures may seriously underestimate the scope of poverty. 7. The Gini coefficient is a commonly used indicator of inequality, ranging from 0 (everything is equally distributed) to 100 (everything in a society belongs to one person). According to the UNDP (2015), Brazil’s Gini coefficient for income is 52.7. The Brazilian Institute of Statistics and Geography estimates that the Gini for land inequality was 85.7 in 1985 and 85.4 in 2009 (IBGE 2009). 8. Email to the author, February 14, 2017. 9. My thanks to Raj Patel for drawing my attention to Drinot’s analysis. 10. “People’s Restaurants” is arguably a better translation of the Portuguese term Restaurantes Populares, but English-language literature to date has nearuniversally referred to them as “Popular Restaurants.” I use the latter phrase to remain consistent with these previous works.

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11. Income in Brazil is commonly discussed in terms of multiples of the national minimum wage. 12. Based on Machado (2003) and Lei Municipal 6.352 de Belo Horizonte. 13. Aranha’s passage also addresses elements of some of the other frameworks we have discussed, including stability and utilization and entitlements. There are also elements of food sovereignty in the focus on local food systems and empowerment. 14. The program outlines here are informed by Machado (2003), Aranha (2000), Rocha (2001), and Araújo and Alessio (2005), as well as my own research and observations between 2003 and 2012. 15. The real (“hey-OW”) is currently (April 17, 2017) valued at US$0.32. 16. Cited in Aranha (2000). Estimates in 2016 U.S. dollars are based on U.S. Federal Reserve data for historical exchange rates and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator. 17. But see Eulich (2014). 18. In fact, the School Meals programs are not allowed to purchase from individual farmers, only farmer associations (Mendonça and Rocha 2015). 19. This term is borrowed from Doimo (1995). 20. This does not include the income from the Popular Restaurants program, or transfers to the city from the federal government for school meals, food assistance, and the popular restaurants. Adding these to the direct budget from the city would more than triple the total budget size: US$32 million in 2013 (Duffles 2013). 21. Unless otherwise noted, names used for interviewees are pseudonyms. 22. Unsurprisingly, the first decreases in patronage of the restaurants (outside of what was seen when one of the locations closed for renovations) occurred after the price increases began, with meals served decreasing each year between 2009 and 2012. This is despite the opening of a third location in 2008 (Duffles 2013).

chapter 4 1. The updated second edition, which I cite throughout, was released in 2010. 2. During a 2003 discussion of SMASAN’s founding, one of its longtime administrators said of Ananias that he was “a devout Catholic” and saw “elimination of hunger as one of his fundamental goals.” Bruera (2013) describes Ananias as having “strong links to the Catholic Church” (235). Montambeault (2016) further points out that, in BH, the rise of the PT did not come from its identification with labor unions, but rather, its membership’s identification with grassroots activist Catholic groups. Catholicism in Brazil in the form of liberation theology has also played an important role in the formation of many of its most prominent social justice movements of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. See also Doimo (1995) and French (2006). 3. Patrus Ananias, elected in 1993, was mayor until 1996. He left office with an 85% approval rating and went on to be the most voted-for deputado (congressional representative) in the history of Minas Gerais in 2002. He

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then became national minister of social development in the administration of President Lula in 2004. For his part, Pimentel was characterized by some SMASAN functionaries as being part of the ascendant “conservative wing” of the PT. 4. The wealthy are unlikely to be hungry, of course, but obesity is also a problem of food security, as I have defined it here, and a form of malnutrition. Obesity is rapidly becoming an urgent problem in Brazil (as throughout much of the world) (Menezes 2005; Tanumihardjo et al. 2007).

chapter 5 1. This chapter is derived in part from M. J. Chappell, J. R. Moore, and A. A. Heckelman, “Participation in a City Food Security Program May Be Linked to Higher Ant Alpha- and Beta-Diversity: An Exploratory Case from Belo Horizonte, Brazil,” Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 40(8): 804–29, March 3, 2016 [online], copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21683565.2016.1160020. 2. These reasons were also mentioned spontaneously in interviews and participant observation with farmers and SMASAN staff. 3. Based on 2016’s minimum wage in Brazil, one-half to 1 minimum wage would be equal to R$440 to R$880, or between US$135 and US$270 per month. 4. In this study, which looked specifically at the Purchase with Simultaneous Donation (PSD) program within PAA, we found “no effect of farmers’ participation in the program on changes in local agricultural practices, production or income.” Possible explanations include that many local farms were contracting during the study period, possibly related to shortages of labor due to competition with mining. The PSD appeared to be too small and too unreliable to significantly affect farmers (Oldekop et al. 2015). 5. The nuance of working with the city government, but independent from them, seemed to be appreciated, although in some cases it seems as if farmers made studiously positive remarks about SMASAN. Nonetheless, we were also able to get critical feedback, especially over the course of an interview as farmers got more comfortable talking to us. 6. Recall that 10–40% of the world’s biodiversity is wholly outside of any protected area (Ferrier et al. 2004). 7. Though the code was revised and arguably weakened in 2012, the general requirements for conservation on private property remain in effect (Soares-Filho et al. 2014). 8. One property used nearly 100% of their land according to the owner, but it was all in greenhouses. 9. This is consistent with a general observation by agroecologists that most “modern,” “improved” crop varieties have in fact been developed to thrive in a very limited set of conditions: high water availability, high synthetic fertilizer inputs, and high synthetic pesticide application. In the messier, much more variable lives of the world’s 570 million farmers, these conditions are not all always available (or desirable).

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10. Given the small sample of farmers, caution in drawing strong conclusions is of course warranted. 11. This is, of course, demonstrably untrue for any number of first world cities, but as the saying goes, “perception is reality.” 12. Although data are only available for 2001–2003, numbers provided by SMASAN shows that gross sales from DdR in terms of average monthly income had a standard deviation of ~R$310 for that time period, or around 10% of average monthly gross. On the other hand, Pratley (2012, 192) reports that, on review, she found city records for the program to be inaccurate. 13. Although this section draws from numerous sources, key information comes from multiple interviews with a former department manager of SMASAN’s Incentives for Basic Production department, which managed Straight from the Countryside and related programs. See also related elements in Nabuco and Souki (2004) and Araújo and Alessio (2005). 14. Participant observation, March 10, 2006, Monthly Organic Agriculture Meeting at the Federal Agricultural Ministry Complex. 15. This contrasts with the results found by Pratley (2012), who reported little engagement or interest in environmental issues on the part of farmers, and hostility to agroecological methods from some administrators and staff within SMASAN. This is not consistent with my experiences, where all farmers except one—SMASAN or not—expressed some degree of environmental consciousness and concern, as did the SMASAN administrators I have discussed. The fact that Pratley and I conducted at least some of our interviews in different years, with different focuses, may explain part of the discrepancy, but the contrast remains an area to be further explored. 16. There is also SMASAN’s separate Organic Fairs program, which faced a number of challenges and dwindling participation itself over the time of my research, including the fact that SMASAN’s organic fairs require producers to sell at 30% below the average market price. 17. Technically, alpha diversity is characterized by both how many species there are, and the relative proportions in the terms of the number of individuals of each species present in an area (evenness). Although evenness is an important aspect of diversity, it is omitted here for simplicity, and because we did not find any major differences in evenness between sites. 18. The reader may have noticed that such a result would mean that the overall landscape over both sites would host only five species total in the first example, but would support ten total species when beta diversity is highest. This total landscape diversity is called gamma diversity. The gamma diversity of the second example is higher than the first, an important condition to note in the many cases where we care about the landscape, not just individual sites. 19. Although very few farmers were familiar with the specific terms of food security, food citizenship, or the right to food, they all agreed that there was a right to food, and that guaranteeing it was a responsibility of the government. (The interviews took place before the right to food became national law in 2006.) 20. Another term for these relationships is “social capital.” Although it is a useful term of art, it also implies a sort of creeping financialization of society

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and its interactions, so it is not used here. Still, much excellent work under this rubric has been conducted (see especially Putnam [2001] and Putnam, Feldstein, and Cohen [2003]). 21. Although in another potential example of complementarity, SMASAN recognizes that government does need to be a provider of certain direct services for the young, the old, marginalized groups, and those enduring difficult circumstances. SMASAN’s programs like the ABCs, Big Popular Basket, Popular Restaurants, School Meals, and programs that supply some daycares and nursing homes with fresh, healthy food fill in where society and private interests cannot be, or are not, adequate providers for universal food security. 22. Araújo and Alessio (2005) point out that there is sometimes nevertheless competition between products sold by the DdR farmers and the ABCs. In a way, they say, this advances the goals of the program, by providing competition and perhaps even lower prices to consumers. On the other hand, this setup plays into the price ratchet discussed earlier for farmers, leading SMASAN’s partnering farmers in a SMASAN Farmers’ Association meeting I attended in March 2004 to ask that the ABCs be prohibited from sales of certain products. 23. Informally, I noticed that one of the administrators deeply involved in DdR seemed to have strong personal connections to the farmers. At a DdR fair, two farmers immediately dived into lengthy, friendly conversation with him about things in general and SMASAN in particular. My personal interactions with him also indicated a level of respect for farmers that was not, perhaps, uniformly shared. In contrast, I saw his successor leave the office—or really interact much with other parts of SMASAN at all—on only one or two occasions over several months. 24. Though with regards to biodiversity, as discussed earlier in this chapter, competing explanations cannot be ruled out yet and further research should build on these exploratory results.

chapter 6 1. Though these meetings were themselves a result of campaign promises made by Barack Obama, and his subsequent election as president. Policy windows often open following changes in political office. 2. Both the “mere exposure” (Zajonc 2001) and the “anchoring” effects (Furnham and Boo 2011) are cognitive biases that would reinforce this conclusion from the MSA. 3. Other important factors in the policies stream do include “value acceptability” and “anticipation of potential constraints” as well, but I would propose that these are somewhat more malleable. It is of course true that cheap proposals that fit into current majority beliefs are more likely to be implemented than an expensive solution that challenges current values. But values within Congress and the general public are often multifaceted, contingent on framing, and even internally contradictory. That is, a clear proposal backed by consensus across a policy community and grassroots groups may be able to mobilize support that, say, clashes with the dominant “capitalist” values, but may tap into the coexisting communal values of the general public (Bowles and Gintis 1998;

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Ellis and Stimson 2012). And while budgetary constraints are always a challenge, having a worked-out plan for funding—e.g., an idea of where the funds are going to come from and how to share the impact—is more important for long-term softening up than simply focusing on having a small budget. 4. Email to the author, February 15, 2017.

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Index

ABasteCer programs, 83table, 90–91, 93, 94, 98–99, 113, 128, 167, 176 acceptability: in Belo Horizonte, 79, 86, 87, 91, 95, 99, 113, 150, 176; as food security criterion, 57, 69box accessibility: in Belo Horizonte, 79, 85, 86, 89, 96, 99, 113, 140, 176, 177, 181; as food security criterion, 56, 57, 69box active optimism, 4–6, 29 adequacy: in Belo Horizonte, 79, 86, 91, 150, 152–62, 176; as food security criterion, 57, 69box Adger, Neil, 41 affordability. See food affordability Affordable Care Act, 28, 189, 198–99 agency: in Belo Horizonte, 79, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 100, 113, 129, 152, 176, 177–78, 179–81; as food security criterion, 57–58, 64, 69box, 164 Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Kingdon), 31, 102 agrarian citizenship, 137 agriculture. See farmers and farming agroecology, 64, 136–37, 152–54, 155–56, 158–59, 162, 173 Agroecology Reference Center, 154 Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon, 62 Alam, Shahidul, 1, 203n1 (ch 1) Alessio, Maria Fernanda, 96–99, 147, 149, 172

Ananias de Souza, Patrus: approach to food security, 76–77, 99; evolution of SMASAN under, 107–8, 110–14, 117–18, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130, 209–10n3 antihunger: advocacy for, 63, 179, 185, 187 Antônio (SMASAN staff), 98, 160, 163 Appetite for Change, 199 Aranha, Adriana, 4, 77–78, 107, 108, 110, 112–13, 117 Araújo, Cibele de, 96–99, 147, 149, 172 Ashraf, Nava, 19 Atlantic Forest, 138, 141, 142map, 144–45, 160–61 availability: in Belo Horizonte, 79, 99, 176; food availability decline, 42, 44, 49, 53, 54–56; as food security criterion, 56, 57, 69box. See also food supplies Bakery School and Pedagogical Kitchen programs, 83table Barber, William II, 190, 195, 196 Basic Food Baskets program, 82table Belo Horizonte: Atlantic Forest near, 138, 141, 142map, 144–45, 160–61; child mortality rates in, 30, 66, 67fig, 77, 89, 108, 122, 123, 179, 208n2; diet and nutrition in, 30, 66, 77, 79, 84table, 86–87, 89–90, 91, 176; farmer support in, 31, 132–74, 178–79; food policies in, 31, 32, 78, 101–31, 133–35, 156,

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Belo Horizonte (continued) 164–73; food security innovations in, 30–32, 65, 66–100, 101–31, 132–74, 175–83, 198–200; fruit and vegetable consumption in, 30, 66, 76, 87, 88, 89–90; health improvements in, 66, 67fig; images of, 5fig, 143fig; infrastructure programs in, 120–25, 127, 129; location of, 142map; malnutrition levels in, 30, 66, 67fig, 77, 89–90, 94, 108, 179; SMASAN of (see SMASAN); Vila Viva program in (see Vila Viva) Big Popular Basket. See Popular Food Basket program biodiversity, 122, 135–37, 138–39, 144–45, 152–53, 156–59, 173; of ants, 145, 156–59 biofortification, 35 birth control, 18–19 Black Panther Party, 61 Blesh, Jennifer, 169 Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) programs, 70, 95, 96, 169 Brazil: Belo Horizonte (see Belo Horizonte); economic issues in, 69–70, 71–73, 115; famines in, 21; food policy evolution in, 64, 70–76, 109, 113, 114–15, 128; Forest Code in, 144; Human Development Index, 69; inequality in, 69–74; land ownership in, 139; military dictatorship in, 74–75, 109; social movements and reform in, 74–76, 87, 113, 114–16, 117, 127, 128, 194–95, 198, 209n2; Social Security Food Service in (see Social Security Food Service); urban vs. rural programs in, 72–73 Brazilian Association of Agribusiness, 116 Brock, Richard, 42 Cairney, Paul, 102, 186 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 115, 117 Cargill, 191 Carneiro, Lucas, 145–46 Catholicism, 108, 209n2 CEASAMinas (Centros de Abastecimento de Minas Gerais), 88, 139, 140, 146, 147, 148, 151, 162 Centers to Prevent and Combat Malnutrition: programs of, 82table, 94, 112 children: Brazilian food policies toward, 73; education for (see education); malnutrition in, 26, 30, 35, 44, 52, 66, 67fig, 77, 89–90, 108, 179; mortality rates, 30, 66, 67fig, 77, 89, 108, 122, 123, 179,

208n2; obesity in, 22–23; stunting in, 35, 44, 45, 52; undernourishment in, 22–23, 52 China: famines in, 9–10, 21, 206n5; food policies of, 9–10; resource use in, 40fig; stereotypes of immigrants from, 73 Citizens’ Action Movement Against Hunger and Poverty and For Life, 75, 113, 114–16, 117, 127, 128, 198 citizenship: agrarian, 137; consumer role in, 4; food, 177; substantive, 58, 61 Clark, Michael, 17 clean water access, 25–26, 53 climate change, 17, 40, 52, 135, 199fig Cohen, Marc, 56 Cohen, Michael D., 102, 103–4 Collins, Joseph, 12, 40, 50, 51–53, 204n10, 207n20 Collor de Melo, Fernando, 75, 115, 117 Colombini, Rogério, 125, 126–27 Community Alliance for Global Justice, 184 community and school gardens, 84table, 92, 93, 98, 129, 176 community-supported agriculture (CSAs), 89, 150 complementarity, 165–68, 174 COMUSAN (Municipal Council for Food and Nutrition Security), 179–80, 181. See also Food Security Council Condorcet, Marquis de, 9, 10, 38 consumers: affordable food for, 44, 45, 72–73, 89, 138, 140–41, 149–50; citizenship role of, 4; Consumer Education programs, 83table, 94, 163, 164–65; farmers as, 24, 44, 46; farmers’ social capital with, 150, 152 contraception, 18–19 Daly, Herman, 133, 208n32 Das, Raju, 47 da Silva, Luiz Inacio “Lula,” 67, 169, 210n3 Davi (SMASAN partner farmer), 148 Davis, Mike, 9–10, 21, 24, 47 deaths. See mortality. de Castro, Célio, 124, 126 de Castro, Josué, 72, 73–74, 198, 199 Delabie, Jacques, 156 democracy: agency and food access in, 58, 179–80; food sovereignty ties to, 61; institutions in struggle for, 3, 28, 29, 175; participatory, 29, 61, 75, 76, 96, 99, 100, 113, 179–181; public debate in, 52, 61; substantive, 58, 61, 164, 175, 179–80

Index De Schutter, Olivier, 42 de Souza, Herbert “Betinho,” 4, 75, 114, 116, 127, 199 Devereux, Stephen, 53–54 de Waal, Alexander, 36–37 diabetes, 35, 66 diet and nutrition: Belo Horizonte improvements in, 30, 66, 77, 79, 84table, 86–87, 89–90, 91, 176; Brazil’s improvements in, 72–74, 87; calorie intake and, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 45, 50–51; diversity and variety in, 35–36, 45, 87, 153, 158; educational programs on, 89, 91; fruit and vegetable consumption in, 30, 66, 76, 87, 88, 89–90; labor productivity ties to, 72–73; meat consumption in, 13, 17–18, 76; obesity and overweight from, 22–24, 34, 35, 210n4; undernourishment from, 8fig, 22–24, 34–35, 50–52, 210n4 (see also malnutrition); United States’ status of, 184 Direto da Roça (DdR). See Straight from the Countryside Dodson, Belinda, 149, 150–51, 164 Doimo, Ana Maria, 194, 195, 209n19 Drinot, Paulo, 73 droughts: food availability during, 20–22 economic issues: agricultural economics, 24–25, 31–32, 42–44, 46–49, 140–41, 145–52, 173–74, 185; for SMASAN programs, 92, 94, 110, 112, 119–20, 124–25; Brazil’s, 69–70, 71–73, 115; capitalism and, 21; famine response and, 10, 21; food justice in relation to, 59–60; food production, 24–25, 26, 36, 42–44, 46–49; inflation as, 115; moral economies, 9, 21; obesity and undernourishment ties to, 23–24; poverty and wealth as (see poverty; wealthiness); trickle-down, 60 Edelman, Marc, 62 Edgar (EMATER extensionist), 154, 163 Edmar (SMASAN partner farmer), 153, 163 education: Brazil’s investment in, 72; consumer, 83table, 94, 163, 164–65; farmers’ level of, 146, 162, 170, 173–74; food sovereignty support for, 63; gender equality and right to, 25–26; health and nutrition, 89, 91; school gardens, 84table, 92, 93, 176; School Meal program, 73, 82table, 86–88, 93, 94, 109, 110, 112, 113, 121, 128, 151,

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169, 176, 179; SMASAN initiatives, 83table, 89, 91, 94, 113, 121, 176 Eliane (SMASAN staff), 95, 120 EMATER-MG (Empresa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural–Minas Gerais), 140, 150, 152, 154, 155–56, 162–64, 167, 168, 172, 174 embeddedness, 165–66, 170–72, 174 entitlement approach: acceptance and incorporation of, 41–42; benefit-loss patterns and, 55–56; food availability decline vs., 42, 44, 49, 53, 54–56; food entitlement decline, 53–56; labor-based, 53; production-based, 53; trade-based, 53; transfer-based, 53 environment: agroecology and, 64, 136–37, 152–54, 155–56, 158–59, 162, 173; biodiversity in, 122, 135–37, 138–39, 144–45, 152–53, 156–59, 173; consumption, population and waste affecting, 39–40; as context for famine risk, 20; environmental justice movement, 59; externalities affecting, 6, 24, 36, 161, 184, 205n3, 205n4; farming and food production interactions with, 6, 13, 24, 60, 64, 135–37, 138–39, 144–45, 152–62, 173–74, 184, 205n4; food sovereignty goals for, 63; gender equality and improvements to, 26; land sharing vs. land sparing debate, 135–37; livestock effects on, 13; population growth and, 39–40; sustainable agricultural practices and, 152–62 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus), 6–7. See also Malthus, Thomas/Malthusianism Evans, Peter, 165–66, 181 extension agents, 138, 154, 159–60, 162, 163. See also EMATER-MG externalities, 6, 24, 35, 36, 161, 184, 205n3, 205n4, 207n24 Family Allowance (Bolsa Família) programs, 70, 95, 96, 169 family farming. See farmers and farming Family Farm Food Purchase Program (PAA), 88, 141, 151–52, 169 famines: benefit-loss patterns of, 55–56; causes of, 20; chronic malnutrition vs., 36–37, 55; deaths from, 9, 21, 34; food availability during, 9–10, 20–22, 54; food policy response to, 9–10, 20–22, 55–56

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FarmAid, 183, 190 farmers and farming: abandonment of farming, 46–47 (see also rural-urban migration); agricultural economics affecting, 24–25, 31–32, 42–44, 46–49, 140–41, 145–52, 173–74, 185; agroecology and, 64, 136–37, 152–54, 155–56, 158–59, 162, 173; ant biodiversity and, 145, 156–59; associations of/for, 88, 113, 148, 171, 172–73; Atlantic Forest and, 138, 141, 142map, 144–45, 160–61; Belo Horizonte’s support for, 31, 132–74, 178–79; cash crops, 44, 141, 154; “clean” and quality standards affecting, 149, 150–51, 158; demographics of, 141–44, 146; environmental issues with, 6, 13, 24, 60, 64, 135–37, 138–39, 144–45, 152–62, 173–74, 184, 205n4; family farms, defined, 138; food consumption by, 24, 44, 46; food production by (see food production); income levels, 46, 48–49, 89, 138, 140, 141, 145–46, 169, 188, 189; institutional influences on, 162–64; land sharing vs. land sparing debate, 135–37; local sourcing from, 88–89, 93; organic, 143, 146, 153, 154–55, 159, 161–62, 163; political and socioeconomic complications for, 148–52, 168, 169–70, 174; power inequalities for, 170–71, 174; state-society synergy and, 164–73, 174; Straight from the Countryside program with, 84table, 88, 93, 113, 122, 134–35, 137–41, 142, 146–52, 155, 158–59, 163, 164, 166–68, 171, 172–73; sustainable practices of, 64, 152–62; treadmills affecting, 26, 43–44, 46, 48–49, 149, 206n9 Federal Trade Commission, 192 Ferguson, Rafter Sass, 173 fertilizers, 36, 43, 46, 60, 116, 136, 138, 153–54, 159 Five A’s of food security, 37, 57–58, 64–65, 68–69, 69box, 77–78, 79, 85–86, 87–88, 89, 90, 91, 95–96, 99–100, 113, 152, 175, 176, 179–80. See also food security Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program, 32, 67–68, 88, 122, 141, 152, 168, 169, 179, 182, 198 food affordability, 44, 45, 72–73, 138, 140–41, 149–50

food availability decline (FAD), 42, 44, 49, 53, 54–56, 135. See also neoproductivism; productivism Food Chain Workers’ Alliance, 183 food citizenship, 177, 211n19 food entitlement decline (FED), 53–56. See also entitlement approach Food First, 184 food justice: food sovereignty and, 59, 64–65, 187–88; power inequality and, 59–61; United States’ movements for, 59, 61, 187–88, 191 food policies: in Belo Horizonte, 31, 32, 78, 101–31, 133–35, 156, 164–73; evolution of in Brazil, 64, 70–76, 109, 113, 114–15, 128; famine response, 9–10, 20–22, 55–56; food sovereignty goals for, 27, 37, 59, 61–65, 187–88, 192–99; human rights considerations for (see human rights); multiple jurisdictions over, 117, 192; power inequality affecting, 49–50, 52–53, 58–65; pseudoadvocates for, 116–17, 131, 191; public interest group positions on, 116; state-society synergy and, 164–73, 174; structural violence of, 23, 36, 37, 53, 60; United States’, 183–97 food production: Belo Horizonte programs, 82–83table; biofortification in, 35; country-specific, 14–15; diversity and variety in, 35–36, 45, 87, 153, 158; economic issues, 24–25, 26, 36, 42–44, 46–49; entitlement approach (see entitlement approach); food sovereignty and, 27, 62; industrial, 13, 36, 42–43, 60, 116, 184–85, 191–92; livestock, 12–13, 17–18, 76, 141; Malthusian views on, 6–12, 37–39, 48, 68, 71; monocrops in, 35, 36; neo-productivism, 42, 45–49; overproduction, 5, 43, 44; per capita, 8fig, 14, 46; persistent under-supply, 44–45, 49; projected future needs, 6–7, 16–18; supply from (see food supplies); sustainable, 64, 152–62; treadmill of production, 26, 43–44, 46, 149; waste from, 12, 13 (see also food waste). See also farmers and farming food security: acceptability in, 57, 69box; accessibility in, 56, 57, 69box; adequacy in, 57, 69box; agency in, 57–58, 64, 69box, 164; availability in, 55–56, 57, 69box; Belo Horizonte’s innovation for (see Belo Horizonte); biodiversity relationship to, 173; definitions of,

Index 55–58; entitlement approach (see entitlement approach); Five A’s of, 37, 57–58, 64–65 (see also Five A’s of food security); food production and (see food production); food supplies and (see food supplies); four pillars of, 56–57; as human right, 56, 107–8, 115, 123, 176–77; institutions supporting, 3–4, 22, 27–31, 129, 175; political dimension of, 37, 61, 62, 64–65 (see also food sovereignty); proposals and possibilities for, 181–83; in “second tendency”: 49, 51, 55–58; stability for, 56; utilization for, 56 Food Security Council, 113. See also Municipal Council for Food and Nutrition Security Food Security Reference Center, 81fig, 119, 121 food sovereignty: definitions of, 61–63; distinctions from food security, 37, 61, 62, 64–65; five components of, 62–63; food justice and, 59, 64–65, 187–88; food production and, 27, 62; indigenous skills and knowledge in, 63; institutions and, 196–97; localization of food systems in, 61, 63; origins of concept, 61–62; power inequality and, 59, 61–65; rights in, 62; in United States, 187–88, 192–97; value and respect for nature in, 63 food supplies: affordable, 44, 45, 72–73, 89, 138, 140–41, 149–50 (see also food affordability); calorie intake and, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 45, 50–51; consumption of (see also consumers); country-specific availability, 14–15; diet and nutrition with (see diet and nutrition); famine- or drought-period, 9–10, 20–22, 54; farmers’, 24, 44, 46; food availability decline, 42, 44, 49, 53, 54–56; global availability of, 12–14; local sourcing of, 88–89, 93; meat (see livestock/meat); percentage of income spent on, 77; persistent under-supply, 44–45, 49; population growth and, 6–12, 8fig, 16–20, 37–40; pricecontrolled, 90–91, 98–99, 149, 155; production of (see farmers and farming; food production); projected future needs, 6, 16–18; quality standards for, 149, 150–51, 158; supply management, 188, 189; surpluses of, 5, 43, 44; waste of (see food waste). See also global food systems

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food waste: economics and, 24; environmental issues with, 39–40; in global food systems, 12, 13–14, 17–18, 22, 24; School Meals and, 87 Ford, Henry, 47 Ford Foundation, 67 Fordism, 47–48, 206n10, 206n15 Franco, Itamar, 115 gender equality and rights: educational access in relation to, 25–26; food sovereignty ties to, 62; institutions for, 27, 28; population growth affected by, 18–20; reproductive control and sexual autonomy, 18–20 genotopia, 29 Geography of Hunger (de Castro), 73–74 Get Our Act Together, 184 global food systems: agricultural and rural economies, 24–25; eight rules for understanding, 12–27; famine- or drought-period availability, 20–22; gender equality and rights effects, 18–20, 25–26; global availability, 12–14; malnutrition decreases, 25–26; obesity and undernourishment issues, 22–24; population growth and projected food needs, 16–18. See also food supplies Goldschmidt, Walter/Goldschmidt Hypothesis, 140 greenhouse gas emissions. See climate change Green Revolution, 15, 27, 42, 46, 47, 206n12 Growing Gardens, 199 gut microbiome, 35 Haddad, Lawrence, 25–26, 45, 205n18 Hardin, Garrett, 11 Harvey, David, 11 Headey, Derek, 48 health issues: Belo Horizonte’s improvements in, 66, 67fig; calorie intake reflecting, 16; diet and nutrition affecting (see diet and nutrition); educational programs on, 89–90, 91; within definition of food security, 26, 56; health care policies, 28, 112, 129, 189, 198–99 (see also Affordable Care Act); malnutrition and undernourishment, 22–24, 26, 34–35, 52; meat consumption and, 13; obesity and overweight as, 22–24, 34, 35, 205n1,

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health issues (continued) 210n4; United States’ universal health care debate (see Affordable Care Act) Henri (farmer), 148, 153, 156, 161 Herbert (farmer), 147–48, 156 Hickel, Jason, 34, 50, 208n6 hidden hunger, 34, 35. See also undernourishment Holt-Giménez, Eric, 61, 63, 64, 187, 191 human rights: food security as, 56, 107–8, 115, 123, 176–77; food sovereignty ties to, 61, 62; substantive democracy and, 175 hunger: conceptions and misconceptions of, 71; definitions of, 50–53; hidden, 34, 35 (see also undernourishment) Incentives for Basic Production programs, 154, 176, 211n13 income: farmers’, 46, 48–49, 89, 138, 140, 141, 145–46, 169, 188, 189; food expenditures as percentage of, 77; inequality, 37, 69, 71–74 (see also inequality; poverty; wealthiness); middle class, 47–48; minimum wage, 60, 73, 96; parity, 188, 189 India: British colonial policies in, 9, 38, 204n6; compulsory sterilization in, 204n6; famines in, 9, 21, 38, 204n6; food supplies in, 9, 15, 45; Green Revolution in, 15, 47; malnutrition in, 15, 44; resource use by, 40fig inequality: gender (see gender equality and rights); Gini coefficient for, 208n7; income, 37, 69, 71–74 (see also poverty; wealthiness); land ownership, 139; power, 49–50, 52–53, 58–65, 69–70, 72, 170–71, 174; racial, 38, 59, 73–74 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), 183, 187 institutions: Brazil’s, 72–73, 194–95; change in Belo Horizonte’s, 31 (see also SMASAN); definition of, 1, 2–3; evolution of, 3–4, 27–30; and the future, 1–4; influences on farmers, 162–64; multiple streams approach to, 102–6, 195–96; policy entrepreneurs within, 195–96; supporting food security by, 3–4, 22, 27–31, 129, 175; supporting food sovereignty by, 196–97 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 56

International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 56, 61, 123 investment: rural versus urban, 24–25 Jairo (SMASAN staff), 120, 126, 127 Jones, Michael, 102 José (SMASAN staff), 111, 118–19, 120–21, 125, 126, 152, 160, 163, 171 Kalil, Alexandre, 180 Kingdon, John, 31, 102, 103, 105–8, 109–11, 114, 116, 118, 121, 122–23, 129, 189, 191, 195 labor productivity and diet, 72–73 Lacerda, Marcio, 130 Lampreia, Luiz Felipe, 123 Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), 134, 137, 155, 168 land sharing vs. land sparing debate, 135–37 Lappé, Frances Moore, 12, 40, 50, 51–53, 204n10, 207n20 Late Victorian Holocausts (Davis), 21 La Vía Campesina (LVC), 61–62, 63, 184, 187, 190, 199 listening, importance of, 197–200, 199fig livestock/meat: dietary considerations, 13, 17–18; environmental impacts of, 13, 205n4; feed conversion ratio, 12–13, 17–18; in greater Belo Horizonte, 76, 141; industrial production, 13 localization movements: Belo Horizonte local sourcing, 88–89, 93; food sovereignty ties to, 61, 63 The Local Politics of Global Sustainability (Prugh et al.), 29 Machado, Moisés, 94, 120 Majority World: definition, 203n1 (ch 1); exploitation of and within, 47–48, 74; food security in, 50; Fordism and, 47–48; livestock/meat in, 13; malnutrition and poverty in, 43–45; “us” and “them” mentality, 11–12. See also inequality; Minority World; structural adjustment malnutrition: Belo Horizonte levels of, 30, 66, 67fig, 77, 89–90, 94, 108, 179; benefit-loss patterns of, 55–56; chronic, 36–37, 42, 55; country-specific food availability and, 14–15; education and gender equality’s effects on, 25–26;

Index health effects of, 22–24, 34–35, 52; reasons for decrease over past forty years, 25–27, 53; statistics on, 34. See also undernourishment Malthus, Thomas/Malthusianism, 6–12, 37–39, 48, 68, 71 Mangabeira (SMASAN staff), 126 Map of Hunger, 115–16 March, James G., 102, 103–4 Marques, Paulo, 116 Marquinho (SMASAN partner farmer), 145, 146, 147, 150, 153, 156, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 172 matrix (landscape concept), 136, 139, 144, 157, 173 Matrix (movies), 2 Meadows, Donella, 32–33, 133, 199 meat. See livestock/meat mental retardation, 35 Messer, Ellen, 56 microbiome. See gut microbiome middle class: evolution of, 47–48 Minas Gerais: 121, 141, 145, 209n3; CEASAMinas in (see CEASAMinas); EMATER in (see EMATER-MG); family farms in: 138; map of, 142map mining, 140, 141, 144; Minority World: connecting farmers and consumers in, 89; consumption and overconsumption in, 13; definition of, 1, 203n1 (ch 1); exploitative or oppressive tactics of, 11, 48, 50, 74; food justice movements, 59, 68; food sovereignty in, 68; high-tech implications for, 1; livestock/meat in, 13; marriage in, 3; “us” and “them” mentality, 11–12. See also inequality; structural adjustment moral economies, 9, 21 mortality: infant/child, 30, 66, 67fig, 77, 89, 108, 122, 123, 179, 208n2; due to starvation, 9, 21, 34; related to obesity and overweight, 22; related to undernourishment, 23 Movement for Ethics in Politics, 75, 115 MSA. See multiple streams approach MST (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement), 134, 137, 155, 168 multiple streams approach, 101–31, 156, 183–92, 195–69; garbage can model refinement via, 104–5; leadership and, 195–96; linear model vs., 101, 103; multiple jurisdictions in, 117, 192; organized anarchy and, 103–4, 109, 118, 121; policy entrepreneurs in,

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105–6, 110–14, 118, 125–26, 130, 189–90, 195–96; policy stream in, 102–3, 104, 105, 108–14, 118–27, 129–30, 186–90, 212–13n3; policy windows in, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 118, 129–30, 183, 184, 186; politics stream in, 102, 103, 104, 105, 114–18, 130–31, 190–92; problem stream in, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106–8, 122–23, 184–86; pseudoadvocates in, 116–17, 131, 191; public interest groups in, 116 Municipal Council for Food and Nutrition Security (COMUSAN), 179–80, 181. See also Food Security Council Municipal Council on School Nutrition, 87. See also School Meals Council Municipal Secretariat of Social Assistance, 84 Municipal Secretariat of the Treasury, 120 Municipal Under-Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security. See SMASAN Nabuco, Maria Regina: food security approach of, 76–77, 99; as policy entrepreneur, 76–77, 99, 111, 112, 131, 171, 178, 180; on SMASAN and EMATER, 160, 164; SMASAN evolution under, 110–14, 117–18, 124, 125–26, 128, 130, 171, 180 National Agroecology Alliance, 156 National Family Farm Coalition, 183–84 National Food and Nutritional Security Law (2006), 177, 180 National Food and Nutrition Security Council (CONSEA), 76, 115, 177, 179, 180 National Program for Food and Nutrition, 109 National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, 183 nature. See environment neo-productivism, 42, 45–49, 135, 206n8. See also food availability decline (FAD); productivism New World Agriculture and Ecology Group (NWAEG), 197 Nightingale, Florence, 9 nutrition. See diet and nutrition obesity and overweight: in Brazil, 210n4; critique of “obesity epidemic,” 205n1, 205n16; health effects of, 22–24, 35; obesogens affecting, 205n1; statistics on, 22, 34; undernourishment with, 22–24, 210n4

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Offices for Agriculture in Alternative Spaces programs, 84table, 93 Ó Gráda, Cormac, 21–22 Oldekop, Johan, 141, 169, 210n4 Olsen, Johan P., 102, 103–4 optimism, 4–6, 29 Organic Fairs program, 84table, 88, 113, 121, 211n16 organic farming, 143, 146, 153, 154–55, 159, 161–62, 163 organized anarchy, 103–4, 109, 118, 121 overpopulation. See population growth overproduction, 42, 43. See also supply management; treadmill effects PAA (Family Farm Food Purchase Program), 88, 141, 151–52, 169 parity, 188, 189 participatory budgeting, 123–124, 182, 190 Pastorinhas settlement, 132–33, 134–35, 137, 155–56 Patel, Raj, 22, 57, 62, 207n26, 208n9 Perfecto, Ivette, 144 persistent under-supply (PUS), 44–45, 49 Peru: influence of on Brazilian food policies, 73 pesticides, 36, 43, 46, 60, 116, 136, 138, 153, 155, 158–59, 160, 162, 205n3 philanthrocapitalism, 28 Pimentel, Fernando, 119–21, 123–24, 126, 127, 129, 130, 210n3 PNAE (Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar), 169. See also School Meal program political ecology, 19–20 political issues: political agency of poor, 170, 179; political complications for farmers, 148–52, 168, 169–70, 174; political dimensions of food security, 37, 61, 62, 64–65 (see also food sovereignty); politics stream of MSA, 102, 103, 104, 105, 114–18, 130–31, 190–92 Pollan, Michael, 184, 187, 191 Popular Food Basket program, 83table, 94, 97–98, 113, 129, 179 Popular Restaurant program, 73, 82table, 84–86, 88, 93, 94, 95–96, 98, 109, 110, 113, 119, 120, 121, 124, 128, 130, 151, 168, 176, 179 population growth: environmental issues and, 39–40; food supplies and, 6–12, 8fig, 16–20, 37–40; gender equality and

rights affecting, 18–20; projected future food needs to meet, 6, 16–18 poverty: Belo Horizonte population in, 77, 129; Brazil’s history with, 70, 71, 74; chronic malnutrition and, 36–37, 42, 55; food and resource provisions and, 7, 8–12, 8fig, 38–41, 43–46, 178–79 (see also food security); political influence and, 170, 179; population growth and, 7, 10–11, 38–39; poverty-reduction efforts, 47; “us” and “them” mentality, 11–12, 38–39. See also inequality power inequality, 49–50, 52–53, 58–65, 69–70, 72, 170–71, 174 Pratley, Erin, 134–35, 138, 149, 150–51, 155, 164, 168, 170, 171, 211n12, 211n15 production, food. See food production production of innocence, 133 productivism: 30, 41, 64, 192; in “first tendency”, 42–46, 48–49; in landsparing, 135. See also food availability decline; neo-productivism Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE), 169. See also School Meal program Pro-Orchard Program, 84table, 93 Prugh, Thomas, 29 pseudoadvocates, 116–17, 131, 191 PT. See Workers’ Party public interest groups, 116. See also specific groups racial inequality, 38, 59, 73–74 Rafael (non-SMASAN farmer), 161, 162 Rafael (SMASAN partner farmer), 148, 156 Rangasami, Amrita, 55, 60 Ray, Daryll, 42 Ribot, Jesse, 3, 41, 52, 58, 61, 98 Ricardo (SMASAN partner farmer), 147, 153, 156 Robbins, Paul, 39 Rocha, Cecilia, 30, 32, 37, 57–58, 64, 68, 77–78, 79, 124, 177, 178. See also food security: Five A’s of Rosen, Jay, 133 Rouseff, Dilma, 156, 169 Rubens (SMASAN staff), 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 111, 152, 177, 199 Rural Coalition, 184 rural-urban migration, 46–47, 139; sanitation, 25–26, 53, 123 Santos, Marília, 162

Index Santos, Matheus, 147 Santoses (farmers), 147, 148, 149, 153, 154–55, 156, 161, 162, 163, 169, 172 Schneider, Mindi, 59, 64 School and Community Gardens program, 84table, 92, 93, 98, 128, 176 School Meal program, 73, 82table, 86–88, 93, 94, 109, 110, 112, 113, 121, 128, 151, 169, 176, 179 School Meals Council, 113, 179, 181. See also Municipal Council on School Nutrition Secretariat of Commerce, 177 Secretariat of Education, 87, 99, 110, 112, 115, 117, 130, 177 Secretariat of Health, 89, 95, 110, 112–13, 115, 117, 130 Secretariat of Social Policy, 119, 125 Secretariat of Social Services, 177 self-determination, 61–62 Sen, Amartya, 10, 20–21, 30, 41–42, 53–54, 114. See also entitlement approach Sequeira, Jemila, 197 Shattuck, Annie K., 63, 64 Simões, Solange, 161 Skidmore, Thomas, 72 slavery,19, 21, 70 SMASAN: acceptability goals of, 79, 86, 87, 91, 95, 99, 113, 150, 176; accessibility goals of, 79, 85, 86, 89, 96, 99, 113, 140, 176, 177, 181; accolades for, 66–67; adequacy goals of, 79, 86, 91, 150, 152–62, 176; agency goals of, 79, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 100, 113, 129, 152, 176, 177–78, 179–81; availability goals of, 79, 99, 176; budget/financial support for, 92, 94, 110, 112, 119–20, 124–25; community and school gardens, 84table, 92, 93, 98, 129, 176; contextualizing successes of, 68, 69–70, 183–92; demographics of participants, 85–86; duties of, 78–79; early programs in, 81fig, 82–83table, 84table, 93–94; educational initiatives, 83table, 89, 91, 94, 113, 121, 176; establishment of, 76–77, 106–8, 110–13, 118, 128, 198; evolution of, 101–31; farmer support and partnerships with, 132–74, 178–79; Five A’s of food security parallels in, 68–69, 69box, 77–78, 79, 85–86, 87–88, 89, 90, 91, 95–96, 99–100, 113, 152, 175, 176,

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179–80; food with dignity goals, 79, 85, 86, 96, 100; goals, successes, and challenges of, 93–99 (see also specific goals); infrastructure programs competing with, 120–25, 127, 129; local sourcing for, 88–89, 93; major programs and successes, 84–92; management system of, 171–72; multifaceted approach, 77, 90, 175, 176; multiple streams approach with, 101–2, 106–31, 156; power inequalities and, 170–71, 174; progress and problems for, 92–93; proposals and possibilities for, 181–83; publicity and public awareness of, 94–95, 98, 164–65, 177–78; shifting priorities affecting, 118–27, 129–31; state-society synergy, 164–73, 174; status of, 119, 125–27; structure of, 78–79, 80fig, 81fig, 180–81; technical feasibility of, 109–10 Smil, Vaclav, 17 Smith, Lisa, 14, 25–26, 45, 205n18 Social Security Food Service (SAPS), 72–73, 74, 198 Souki, Léa Guimarães, 124, 160, 164 SoulFire Farm, 199 Southeastern African-American Farmers’ Organic Network, 184 Souza Martins, José de, 139 stability: as food security criterion, 56 The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI), 51, 52 state-society synergy, 164–73, 174 sterilization, compulsory, 204n6 Straight from the Countryside Association of Farmers, 113, 148, 171, 172–73 Straight from the Countryside (DdR) program, 84table, 88, 93, 113, 122, 134–35, 137–41, 142, 146–52, 155, 158–59, 163, 164, 166–68, 171, 172–73 structural adjustment. See Washington Consensus structural violence, 23, 36, 37, 53, 58, 60 Stuffed and Starved (Patel), 22 sub-Saharan Africa: contraception in, 19; food supplies in, 14–15 substantive citizenship, 58, 61 substantive democracy, 58, 61, 164, 175, 179–80 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 185 supply management, 188, 189. See also overproduction; treadmill effects

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Temer, Michel, 198 Tendler, Judith, 32 Tilman, David, 17 treadmill effects, 26, 43–44, 46, 48–49, 149, 206n9 undernourishment: health effects of, 34–35, 52; obesity and overweight with, 22–24, 210n4; prevalence metrics, 50–52; statistics on, 8fig, 22, 34. See also malnutrition United Kingdom: colonial policies of, 9, 10, 38, 204n6; National Health Service, 28 United Nations: analysis of Belo Horizonte/ SMASAN, 67; Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 17, 50–51, 52, 55, 56–57, 205n4; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 56; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 56, 61, 123; Millennium Development Goals, 122, 123; special rapporteur on the right to food of, 42; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 56, 123 United States: Affordable Care Act, 28, 189; agricultural and rural economies in, 22, 25, 140, 183–92; Belo Horizonte lessons applied in, 175, 183–92, 198–200; compulsory sterilization in, 204n6; consensus in food movement in, 187–188, 193–94; Department of Agriculture, 192; Department of Justice, 185–86, 187, 192; Farm BIll, 185; farmers and farming in, 25, 26, 140, 185; food security and poverty in, 14, 44, 47, 184, 185; food sovereignty in, 187–88, 192–97, 199; food supplies in, 14, 44, 188, 189; food system in, 32, 46, 175, 183–97; Fordism in (see Fordism); gender equality and rights in, 19–20; institutions in, 183, 196–97 (see also institutions); labor movements in, 47, 206n17; La Vía Campesina in, 183–184; livestock/meat in, 13; middle class evolution in, 47–48, 206n17; movements for food justice in, 59, 61, 187–88, 191,199; multiple jurisdictions in, 192; multiple streams approach and, 106, 129, 183–92; optimism in, 4, 199; pesticide use in, 46; policy entrepreneurs in, 189–90, 195–96; policy stream in, 186–90, 212–13n3; policy windows in, 183, 184, 186; politics stream in, 190–92; problem stream in, 184–86; pseudoadvocates in,

191; resource use in, 39, 40fig; slavery in, 19, 70; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), 185; treadmill effects in, 46; universal health care debate in (see Affordable Care Act); “us” and “them” mentality in, 38–39; wages and productivity, 46, 60 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 56, 123 U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, 184, 187 utilization: as food security criterion, 56 utopia, 29 Vandermeer, John, 144 Vargas, Getúlio, 72, 73, 74 Vila Viva program, 121, 123, 124, 127, 129 Wang, Yi, 187, 191 Washington Consensus, 25 water access, clean, 25–26, 53 Watts, Duncan, 195–96 wealthiness: of countries (see Minority World); food consumption statistics, 39–40, 40fig; obesity and undernourishment and, 210n4; political influence from, 170; population growth and, 10, 11, 38; “us” and “them” mentality, 11–12, 38–39. See also inequality we bono reasoning, 12, 39, 41, 53, 199, 206n7 Wilson, Brad, 42 Wise, Tim, 6, 42 Wittman, Hannah, 61, 137, 152, 169, 208n36 women and girls: contraception for, 18–19; education access for, 25–26. See also gender equality and rights Workers’ Convoy programs, 83table, 91, 94, 96–98, 128, 167, 176, 179 Workers’ Party (PT): Brazil’s food policy evolution and, 75–76; disillusionment with, 169, 210n3; influence on SMASAN’s evolution, 67, 75–76, 87, 96, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 127, 128, 168, 169–70; lack of competition with, 170; lessons learned from, 198, 199; Parallel Government and reform agenda, 75–76, 107, 115, 117, 128, 168, 182; rise of in Belo Horizonte, 107, 209n2 World Food Crisis (1972–74), 107 World Health Organization (WHO): micronutrient deficiency statistics, 207n20; obesity statistics, 22

Index World Hunger: 10 Myths (Lappé & Collins), 12 world hunger, ending, 4, 14, 16, 30 Wright, Angus, 70, 144 Wright brothers, 30

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Zahariadis, Nikolaos, 103, 191 Zambia: contraception and fertility in, 19 Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) program, 32, 67–68, 88, 122, 141, 152, 168, 169, 179, 182, 198