Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Perhaps what is most striking about Belo Horizonte's food policy
is not that the government is involved in food pricing, but the city's
explicit regard for food as a human right. According to Adriana Aranha,
the city's Hunger Program director, “We believe the status of citizen
surpasses that of consumer. . . . Quality food for all is a public good”
(quoted in Lappé and Lappé 2002). Because it aims to increase food
access as well as local control of the food system, Belo Horizonte's
approach refl ects the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty.
Proponents of this city's program argue that it moves beyond charity
models and emergency feeding programs, establishing the government's
authority to ensure that all citizens are adequately fed. Such government
intervention directly confronts the market-oriented logic of structural
adjustment described earlier in this chapter. This demonstrates that when
local governments are supportive of food sovereignty, they can foster
norms of participation that highlight citizenship and human rights. In
the United States, the food justice movement has similarly named food
as a human right, but has not developed the kind of policy or govern-
ment support seen in Belo Horizonte.
Although Belo Horizonte's government is involved in food pricing, it
does not aim to eliminate market exchange as a means of food distribu-
tion. Indeed many of this city's programs, according to Aranha, are
aimed at “helping to keep the market competitive.” To this end, city
offi cials announce various supermarkets' prices of forty-fi ve commodities
in the newspapers and over the radio, enabling customers to fi nd low-
cost items. This is complicit with the neoclassical economic assumption
that proper information regarding prices ensures competition and thus
market functioning. Although it counters the logic of a neoliberal food
system by asserting a role for the state in the prevention of hunger, Belo
Horizonte's notion of
food citizenship
does not oppose strategies that
make use of market mechanisms.
Despite their success at the local level, proponents of Belo Horizonte's
food program recognize that hunger is tied to wider structural inequalities
in land ownership and employment. Aranha remains hopeful, however,
that Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula de Silva's national antihunger
program will begin to address these larger inequalities. The president may
fi nd a model of national policy promoting food sovereignty in Cuba.
Socialist Agriculture in Cuba
Cuba's embrace of local, low-input agroecology was the result of crisis.
Before the 1959 revolution, land was concentrated in the hands of
