Regional Paper - Latin America

Global good sufficiency - a Brazilian Perspective


Food and nutritional security is intimately linked to development, in which the agri-food system, particularly the small and medium-sized producers, play a significant role

1. Analysis of the situation in Brazil: two projects in dispute:

• The hegemony of agri-business which controls production, processing and marketing of food; the high concentration of land ownership; enjoying government incentives; export-orientated monoculture; technological model which is causing rapid degradation of natural resources.
• Rural Brazil is also the Brazil of family agriculture and traditional population groups, which are seeking to affirm their specific cultural and historical identity and are responsible, in an absolute majority of the country's rural establishments; for driving the local economies, producing most of the food consumed by the Brazilian population, and applying the most sustainable (agri-ecology) and solidarity-based production systems.

2. Measures taken to improve food security:

• The ZERO Hunger programme,....
• Family farms have won significant victories at the level of the federal government's public policies, which have made viable and strengthened alternatives which have in turn boosted and encouraged family-based ways of life and production: increased resources of the PRONAF (National Programme for strengthening Family Farms) and diversified its line of action; creation of food and nutritional security-oriented programmes; implementation of programmes designed to ensure agricultural production and marketing (harvest-guarantee and price guarantee, acquisition of foods – PAA (Food Acquisition Programme)); establishment of a new policy on technical backup and rural extension; the law on Family Farms and the law on the SUASA (Single System for Dealing with Agri-Stockbreeding Health Issues). Extending these achievements means a chance of moving forward in the direction of strengthening 'family agriculture'.

3. Position of Family Agriculture and the CONSEA (National Council on Food Security):

• We advocate that in establishing the sustainable, solidarity-based development project, the State should intervene in the economy with all instruments available, establishing demands and conditions to boost the internal market.
• Family agriculture is a constituent element for developing a policy of sustainable, solidarity-based development and food sovereignty, and should be subsidised so that it can affirm itself and ensure control of all stages of the production process, with particular priority being given to production for own-consumption and the domestic market, encouraging cooperation between producers and consumers, on the basis of a new technological approach capable of responding to the growing social and environmental demands, and ensuring the supply of healthy, quality food.
• In all international negotiations, including and prioritising 'non-commercial considerations with regard to agriculture', ensuring the sovereign exercise of policies of supporting food production and supply to the detriment of strictly commercial logic.
• Following the example of the REAF (Commission on Family Agriculture) within Mercosur, to create international institutional spaces bringing together representatives of government and of civil society, with a view to coordinating the putting forward of proposals for technical and political measures, so as to guarantee special, differentiated treatment conditions, e.g. food security and nutritional policies, the preservation of the environmental goods and services production capacity of family agriculture, traditional communities and indigenous peoples.