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It's notable that this entire program, which easily and quickly wiped out hunger, costs city residents 1 penny per day. The solution was not a lot of money but rather facilitating natural cooperators--such as organic farmers--in distributing their food in the city, controlling the price of certain basic foods in the public markets that were established and creating new institutions such as low-cost restaurants. A bit of regulation and lots of facilitation toward the common goal.
Venezuela has a similar program, nationwide--government-run supermarkets where all prices are lower (and where they print the Constitution on the grocery bags!), and other community food services including low-cost restaurants (as well as a well-thought out land reform program which provides training and loans to farmers and farming co-ops and requires sustained food production for five years before the farmers earn title to the land).
Addressing poverty, at long last, is a common theme throughout the region among countries that have elected leftist governments--most of the region. Rightwing governments, not so much. In fact, the most rightwing, that is, fascist governments-- the best 'friends' of the U.S. in the region--kill advocates of the poor and the hungry, like those feeding the hungry in Belo Horizonte, kill the poor themselves in great numbers and displace millions of peasant farmers (5 million in Colombia) with state terror--the worst human displacement crisis on earth. For this, Colombia receives $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid. We shouldn't be fooled that this money is for the "war on drugs" or "fighting terrorists." It is for driving the poor from their lands, with toxic pesticide spraying, murder and oppression, giving the lands to the rich and the corrupt, and creating a slave labor pool in the urban areas for the rich to exploit. The peasant farmers can feed their families, their extended families and their communities. They have been doing so for centuries. Our U.S. corporate rulers want them addicted to McDonald's and Burger King and desperate for low-paying jobs.
The way to fight hunger is, first of all, NOT to drive peasant farmers from their lands--or, given a fait accompli, as in Venezuela, after decades of rightwing mismanagement and oppression, reversing the displacement with land reform, as much as possible.
I don't know much about the displacement of peasant farmers in Brazil. I sense that it is a complicated problem, partly because Brazil is so big, with such a variety of landscapes, economies and cultural groups. Loggers, ranchers and farmers, large and small, have been stripping the Amazon forest (which doesn't grow back) for ag uses. That is hardly a good development in the "back to the land" movement. I know that campesinos and environmentalists objected to corporate soy/corn biofuel production because it would displace food farmers and is toxic to farm workers. But I don't have a grasp of the whole problem and all of its aspects. I would guess that Brazil's leftwing government, whose president has been strongly allied with Chavez in Venezuela, in particular, and also with leftwing leaders like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, who are intimately involved with the campesino (peasant farmer) movement, would be far better on these issues than any rightwing government, and this will no doubt continue to be true of Dilma Rousseff, Lula da Silva's successor in Brazil, who has an ever more radical leftist background than da Silva. Beyond that, and the biofuels controversy (which da Silva was on the wrong side of), I don't know what the displacement and food security/food sovereignty situation is in Brazil--but this wonderful project in Belo Horizonte is certainly a good omen, and I'm glad to hear that it is spreading.
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