Ending hunger requires changing our perspective. A government policy of tidbits, such as needed but obscenely low food stamps and school lunch programs, evinces a belief that hunger is a matter of individual failure.
Our government's tunnel vision yields counterproductive solutions, such as legislation to reduce childhood obesity and improve school nutrition that is partially funded by cutting future food stamp benefits. Or, we try to reduce our offensively high poverty rates by creating a supplemental poverty figure that removes on paper 8 million people from poverty by including food stamps in the income calculation.
It would be more productive toward actually ending hunger if we recognized that hunger is a violation of human rights, and interrelated with education, poverty, discrimination, economy, health care, and environment.
We could learn from a city in Brazil that is ending hunger.
Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is an example of how U.S. cities can work to successfully decrease hunger and malnutrition with the ultimate goal of actually ending hunger rather than continual stopgap measures of just providing food. Brazil focused on both remedying the immediate situation of providing food and creating mechanisms or tools to end hunger by making access to affordable, healthy food sustainable.
Belo Horizonte is a city of 2.5 million people, 11% of its citizens living in poverty, and 20% of its children suffering hunger.
In 1993, a newly elected administration started a new model to fight hunger that has yielded dramatic successes: 60% decrease in infant mortality and 75% decrease in children hospitalized for malnutrition as consumption of fruits and vegetables increased.
The cost for winning the fight against hunger was less than 2 % of the city's budget.
Some of the components of the city's program include:
(1) A recognition that access to food is a right of citizenship and thus nutritious food should be provided to everyone.
The city recognized that citizens have a right to "adequate quantity and quality of food" and that government has a duty to "guarantee this right." Earlier this year, Brazil added the right to food as a fundamental right in its Constitution.
This human right to food created a "new social mentality" that "everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good."
This is what is missing in the U.S. We treat hunger as if the individual failed and should be ashamed, rather than as resulting from our corporate and governmental policies. We treat hunger as a matter of charity, where our government's tidbits would be a total disaster if private foundations like Feeding America did not exist to provide food now.
Congress does not provide a solution that includes the big picture of how poverty, hunger, malnutrition, discrimination, economy, health care, education and environment are intertwined. It does not take a leadership role in providing programs that will actually end hunger by providing tools for communities to sustain access to healthy foods.
(2) The creation of a citizen council advisory agency.
The 20-member council included citizen, labor, business and church representatives who advised on the design and implementation of a new food system.
(3) Local farm produce is used at local schools.
This program assists the local economy while also providing more nutritious meals for the children. Instead of the city paying corporations for processed food for school lunches, the city buys healthy food from local farmers. The city established a program to encourage small farmers to sell their produce locally. The city assists the small farmers with advice, technical support, equipment loans and provides access to public spaces while schools teach children how to grow vegetables.
(4) Local farmer produce stands located throughout the city.
One innovative idea was to bring the fresh food to the people to eliminate the problem of food deserts or areas of cities that do not have access to food stores that provide affordable and healthy food:
It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.
This access to food also provided economic benefits as the local produce stand enabled one mother to now support her three children and even buy a truck.
(5) Entrepreneurs bid on high traffic locations of land to market their produce.
The city set up a system where entrepreneurs have an opportunity to bid on the "right to use well-trafficked plots of city land" for markets that sell food at low prices. In return, these markets sell 20 healthy food items grown by in-state farmers at a price set by city that is usually 2/3 of the market price. The rest of the produce is sold at market prices. In addition, each weekend these entrepreneurs take their produce trucks to poor neighborhoods so that good produce is available to all.
(6) People's restaurants provide meals without stigmas.
These restaurants each day serve 12,000 or more people with locally grown food for 50 cents a meal. There is no stigma to eating at these restaurants, partially because no one has to prove that they are poor, and there is a mixed clientele (pdf file) of around 87% low income and the rest are students and professionals from middle class. There are grandparents, newborns, and young couples wearing street clothes, uniforms or business suits.
(7) Community gardens and news of best food markets.
The city has community and school gardens as well as classes on nutrition.
In addition, the city works with a local university to keep food markets honest with pricing by surveying the price of food at supermarkets and then posting the survey results at bus stops, online, television, radio and newspapers so that people can shop at the markets with good prices.
Not everything that works in Brazil may be transferable to communities in the U.S. We can try a new way that provides more than a band aid to hide what is happening in our country. We can recognize that food is a human right. We can recognize that hunger is the logical outcome of GOP policies to drown government in a bathtub with the assistance of discrimination, union busting and corporatism.
Not to be cynical, but now that newspapers are reporting that the Census Bureau data shows that the "face of the poor has changed ominously" from the "stereotype of the inner-city single mother collecting welfare checks" to "full-time workers who cannot earn enough to meet their needs or middle-class workers driven into the ranks of the poor by lost jobs or shrinking incomes," maybe now perspectives of blaming those who suffer hunger will stop.
Maybe now that our military leaders say nutrition lapse could threaten security because obesity is the "leading reason why young Americans cannot qualify for military duty," maybe now perspectives will change.
If you want to donate money, here is the Feeding America donation page.
If you have time to volunteer, here are some handy tools to find out what assistance is needed:
--Plug your zip code into this search engine to find opportunities in your area to assist hunger organizations.
--Typing in your zip code and state in this search engine will locate food banks in your area.
--Clicking onto to your state on this map will return results for homeless shelters and soup kitchens in your area.
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