This is from Food First:

Belo Horizonte: The Brazilian City that Values Food Sovereignty

For the past 15 years the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil has successfully implemented a city-wide effort to feed the 340,000 people who need assistance to get affordable, healthy food. While many other programs in Brazil have failed, Belo Horizonte has succeeded with a mix of innovations that involve government programs, direct negotiation with private food firms, decentralization; and collaboration between government and non- governmental agencies.

These city-wide programs are coordinated by the Secretaria Municipal de Abastecimento (SMAB) with three goals—promotion of consumption and nutrition, food distribution administration, and food production incentives. There are three departments for each goal, and each department collaborates with The Conselho Municipal de Abastecimento e Segurança Alimentar (COMASA) which includes 20 municipal, state, and federal agencies; labor unions, food production and distribution; consumer advocacy; and nongovernmental organizations.

The food programs implemented by SMAB and the community include:

--City listings of the lowest prices for select food, hygiene items, and cleaning supplies. This list can be found on the phone, internet, newspapers, and at bus stops.

--The Pro Orchard Project to promote planting of fruit trees by providing small and large-sized seedlings as well as organic fertilizer.

--The City Supplies Center (CAM) which sells 40,000 tons per year, The CAM has two sectors: wholesale farmers; the other, retail Old Fair. Here consumers can find quality products monitored by the city. The Center also has a bank, post office, telephone station and police station. But the great novelty is the Green Market, where producers sell wholesale to grocers and restaurants and retail to consumers.

--Straight from the Country offers farm produce harvested year-round. Each producer sells directly to the consumer, with the producer getting better prices for his products and the consumer buying healthy food for a price below market value.

--Agroecological Experience Center is a community space for the production, reproduction and distribution of seedlings and seeds.

--The Worker’s Convoy mobile grocery store is aimed at people with incomes between 1 and 3 times minimum salaries to provide healthy nourishment. It sells quality items of basic rations at low prices. It is supervised by SMAB.

--"ABasteCer ("To Supply") is a small market that is price and quality controlled by the city with products sold up to 50% cheaper than at grocery stores.

--District Markets: Belo Horizonte city government is revitalizing the district markets by transforming them into multiple use spaces, where food and culture meet.

--The Lagoinha Popular Market is a market with a theatre, restaurants, and bars. The city is also implementing incentives for retail spaces to be given to family businesses to create a stronger local economy.

--The Popular Restaurant: serves around 3,000 meals to low-income workers (1 to 3 times minimum salaries) at low prices.

--The Pe-de-Moleque Program -Nourishing Children and Teenagers consists of three projects: Preventing and Fighting Malnutrition, School Meals, and Nourishment Support to Nurseries.

http://www.unesco.org/most/southa10.htm

http://www.alternatives.ca/article3930.html

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060911/fmlappe

A Right to Food?

Frances Moore Lappé

"If someone can't afford to buy food, they're still a citizen and we're still responsible to them," city official Adriana Aranha in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, told me in 2000. What a concept--and one that had helped her to lift her Workers' Party to victory in municipal elections seven years earlier.

Declaring healthy food a right of citizenship in Brazil's fourth-largest city, the new administration drew together voices from labor, the church and citizen groups. Their innovations, coordinated by a new city office of food security, range from twenty-five fair-price produce stands supplied by local farmers to open-air restaurants serving 12,000 subsidized meals daily to city-sponsored radio broadcasts leading shoppers to the lowest-priced essentials.

These and many more city-led initiatives to end hunger consume only 1 percent of Belo's budget, but they're working. Hard evidence is the city's infant death rate, a widely accepted measure of hunger, which fell an astonishing 56 percent over the first decade of these efforts. Belo's approach has inspired multiple right-to-food initiatives nationwide as part of President Lula's Zero Hunger Program.


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