A City That Ended Hunger

“I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.”

Frances Moore Lappe
Author of Diet for a Small Planet
co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute

Belo Horizonte is the fourth largest city in Brazil with a population over 2.5 million people, and at one time, had 11 percent of its population in absolute poverty and 20 percent of its children going hungry. But in 1993, newly elected officials declared that food is a right of citizenship. “If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.”

So the new mayor did what good politicians should do-got committed to fixing a problem. They assembled a 20 member council of city leaders and then took the bold step of developing a “food-as-right policy” to solve the city’s problems of hunger and malnutrition. Essentially, the people of Belo figured out how to better connect local family farmers with consumers, wealthy and poor alike. Here is what they did:

• Offer local family farmers dozens of prime spots in public urban places. By doing so, they essentially redistributed retailer markups on produce, which often ran over 100 percent, to consumers and the farmers.
• The city made good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for these “ABC Markets”.
• The city determines a set price, about two-thirds of the market price, on 20 local grown items. The rest can be sold at market price.
• An attached obligation of the ABC sellers with the best spots is to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, every weekend, so everyone can get fresh produce.
• The city council then designed 3 large, open air “People’s Restaurants” that serve 12,000 people. Locally grown food for the equivalent of 50 cents per meal.
• Belo’s food security initiatives also provides school lunches, once spent on processed food, whole food grown locally; includes extensive school and community gardens and nutrition classes.

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

In less than a decade, these are the results of the Belo Initiative:

• Reduced Infant death rate by more than half.
• The initiative benefits more than 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million citizens.
• The total cost of this effort was $10 Million annually, or less than 2% of the city budget. That is roughly 1 penny a day per Belo Resident?

The most striking lesson of the Belo Initiative is what the City Council reported, “It is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 2:00 pm and is filed under farmers markets, food facts, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.