An End to Hunger

Belo Horizonte, a Brazilian city of 4 million people that has ended hunger. / Photo source: Wikipedia commons.

How One City Accomplished What Seemed Impossible

By Dr. Joshua Strange, Two Rivers Tribune Contributing Writer

Few feelings in the world are as unbearable as the pain of an empty stomach, especially when that gnawing hunger eats at your empty belly at night when you go to bed and stays with you to the morning when you wake up.  And how does it feel to face the dilemma of choosing between foods that you know will make you sick later or no food at all?  Or having to sacrifice your dignity and beg or scrounge for food or money?

Starvation and famine occur in isolated parts of the world with unfortunate regularity, grabbing headlines and prompting calls for aid and support. And while these scourges are serious, chronic hunger and malnutrition often go unreported and yet are reaching epidemic proportions across the world and here in America too.

Even as people are struggling to have money to buy food or to access healthy food, farmers are also struggling to make a living selling the fruits of their labor. Even local organic farmers in our area, whom get a premium price for their organic produce, still work long hours and drive to the coast with no certainty of how much produce they will actually sell and no guarantee of having enough money from month to month to get by.

The global hunger and agriculture problem is crying for answers, but the seeming difficulty of solving the problem can leave even optimistic people shaking their heads.  Of course it’s not a food production problem as much as it’s a food distribution and access problem. Even so, being able to keep food cheap and accessible for the poor while increasing the income of farmers, especially small scale family farmers, appears to be opposing goals.

But what if I told you that a city with over four million people had found answers and achieved these opposing goals? What if such a city made chronic hunger a thing of the past and allowed small family run farms to thrive like never before?

Hard to imagine right, especially when you can see lots of destitute people in modern, wealthy cities like San Francisco, or heck even here in Humboldt County. And yet it’s true—such a place really exists—it’s called Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest city in Brazil.

The end of hunger in Belo started in 1993 through 2001 when the administration of a newly elected mayor declared that having nutritious food was right of citizenship. At that time, Belo struggled with poverty and hunger like all other cities.

Over 20 percent of children were going hungry every day and over 10 percent of families lived in destitute poverty. People who could not afford to buy food went hungry day after day and scavenged what they could, getting sick and demoralized in the process.

But now Belo has accomplished the seemingly impossible goals of ending hunger and improving the lives of farmers by using a variety of programs that combine the needs of consumers and farmers. These innovative programs were crafted and guided by a 20 member council of community leaders with a participatory budgeting process involving interested citizens.

City Supplies Contracts

A center piece of Belo’s success, this program uses the purchasing power of the city to negotiate food supply contracts directly with local farmers for a set amount and price per crop at the beginning of each season.  This allows the city to purchase whole foods at a reduced cost because there is no middle man, and for the same reason gives farmers a better price, and equally important, assurance for how much of given crop they will be able to sell.

This is a lifeline for farmers that allows them to plan their growing season with greater certainty and can get them through hard times if other markets don’t go well.  The purchased food is also used to supply the city’s free school lunch program, thereby saving the schools money and increasing the health and performance of students by increasing the amount of wholesome foods in their diet.

The Food Basket Program

The savings made by purchasing food directly from farmers is also passed along to lower income families (defined as earning less than twice the minimum wage) through a distributed network of community markets and mobile truck stands.

The mobile produce trucks, known as the Worker Convoys, allows access to healthy food in slums and neighborhoods that otherwise wouldn’t have any access.  Typically, this food is sold at 40 to 50% below supermarket prices due to the saving from the city’s supplies contracts.

ABC Markets and Land Use Planning

The concept behind the ABC markets was to increase access to food for citizens and improve options for urban farmers by auctioning off curbside vendor booths at prime locations of heavy pedestrian traffic throughout the city. This allows farmers the security of having an affordable place to market their produce directly to consumers and again reduce prices for consumers by removing the middle men.

In addition, the city offered affordable leases to farms on vacant or undeveloped lots throughout the city to increase the production of food until the property were developed for other uses. Belo also works with the governments of surrounding towns to ensure land use planning keeps enough land reserved for agriculture production in an evenly dispersed manner, which helps ensure urban food production and cuts down on transportation costs.

The Popular Restaurants

Farm produce purchased by the city is also used to supply a network of modern cafeteria style restaurants that serve three wholesome meals per day. The food at these restaurants is not only cheap, at the equivalent of 50 cents per meal, but also quiet healthy. This allows patrons to save money for other needs like buying a home, but also reduces health costs to patrons and the city by helping to reduce diet related illness.

The opposite is typically true in America where the cheapest food is typically the worst for your health such as fast food chains, dollar stores, and USDA food commodities.  While these restaurants are targeted towards lower income earners, no income verification is required as part of the city’s philosophy of “food with dignity.” Contrast this arrangement to the degrading process and stigmatization that is often experienced by recipients of government assistance in our country.

Community and School Vegetable Gardens

Belo also encouraged its citizens to grow as much of their own food as possible by establishing a network of community gardens where families can get a plot for a garden along with free seeds, seedlings, and classes on how to grow food and fundamentals of healthy nutrition. As part of this effort, each school also has its own garden so kids can learn the basics of how to grow their own food, which plants seeds for a lifetime of food empowerment.

There are of course still conventional supermarkets within the city.  Previously these supermarkets had a virtual monopoly on the food markets and could therefore control prices and increase profits.  This practice – known as price gouging – can occur when a market lacks true competition or accurate information, which can occur in a large city with consolidation of ownership or in a small town with only one supermarket.

As a simple measure to increase competition and fairness in pricing, the city surveys the prices of 45 basic food items at all outlets throughout the city and publishes the list weekly at public places such as bus stops, libraries, and markets.

Price gouging has stopped as result without any additional governmental regulation of the markets, which isn’t suspiring given that access to accurate information about goods and services and competition without monopolies are central requirements of any true free market system.

These programs continue to grow and gain momentum since their beginning in 1990s, and since that time hunger has been practically eliminated and infant morality rates, which reflect the quality of a community’s nutrition, have been cut in half.

Another inspiring fact is that one of the leaders of Belo’s movement, an economics professor and former mayor of Belo named Fernando Pimentel, had been imprisoned and tortured as a young dissident at the hands of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil, and terrorized its critics, from 1964 to 1985. Mr. Pimentel is truly a testament to holding onto to one’s ideals and never giving up hope.

According to some city officials the most shocking thing that was learned from Belo’s experience was how easy it was to end hunger. All of these programs were achieved at a cost of only two percent of the annual city budget per year, or equivalent to one penny a day per resident.