The City That Ended Hunger

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”
CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. 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.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=3330

it has eliminated hunger whenever it has been allowed to exist <sarcasm>.

Hunger and starvation are rarely ever because of the unavailability of enough food. It is almost always because of a lack of economic ability to get the food to the hungry people.

As the author notes..

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

Depending upon the rigorousness of the definition of democracy, it isn't even clear that democracy is good at addressing hunger. Famine, disease, drought, these things are handled fairly well by democracies. But absence these catastrophies, we have a country with a severe obesity problem, while people are going hungry.

to favor corporations over people, and corporate profits over the economic well-being of each and every US citizen, nothing like this stands a chance of happening here.

To paraphrase from the Monty Python Meaning of Life song, "Every Sperm is sacred",

"Every corporation's sacred,
Every corporation's great.
If a corporation gets taxed or forced to take responsibility for its actions
It gets quite irate.

Every corporation's powerful.
Screw the little folk.
If they think their votes count
well, that's just a joke.

Corporations rule us.
Their lobbyists ride high.
If you get in their way somehow,
Just kiss your ass goodbye."

:kick:

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