CASTLE ROCK, Colorado — For several years, Brazil had been internationally famed for its incredible progress in reducing food insecurity and hunger. In 2014, the country got off the World Food Programme’s Hunger Map in recognition of a decade of food insecurity reduction. For context, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization global hunger report from 2014 said that over the past 10 years, the population of Brazilians suffering undernourishment fell by one-third.
However, the headway Brazil has made in the past decade began to deteriorate in 2015 as there were drastic spikes in the number of Brazilians experiencing food insecurity and hunger. Denise Oliveira e Silva, a researcher from Fiocruz, attributed the cause for this dramatic deterioration of progress to be a combined product of political crisis following Dilma Rousseff’s second term, a small scale global recession and the federal government’s inability to adopt a litany of social protection policies.
Denise Oliveira e Silva additionally posits that recent Brazilian presidents, namely former President Michel Temer and current President Jair Bolsonaro, only eroded these social protection policies and programs. In March 2021 Brazilian NGO PENSSAN conducted a study and stated that nearly 116 million Brazilians, 54% of the population, faced some degree of food insecurity in 2020. This estimate could potentially be higher considering the respective impact COVID-19 has had on food insecurity. While difficult to quantify, it is obvious that the pandemic made food insecurity and hunger more severe in Brazil and the world at large. Despite these challenges, one organization that came into being during the pandemic to fight food insecurity and hunger in Brazil is the country’s own NGO, Full Belly Brasil. Here is some information about the work of Full Belly Brasil.
Full Belly Brasil: Fighting to Get off the Hunger Map
The Borgen Project spoke with John Dewald, the president and co-founder of Full Belly Brasil, to capture the great work his organization has been carrying out alongside local community partners in Brazil to reduce food insecurity. Dewald explained that in Brazil, there are more than 116.8 million people living in food insecurity and 19.1 million Brazilians going hungry. Brazil is a major food producer and exporter, leaving the cause of widespread food insecurity and hunger as a distribution problem. Dewald explained that people in Brazil waste thousands of tons of food every day due to expiration before its gets to supermarket shelves.
In recognition of this vast food insecurity, in part a consequence of food waste, Full Belly Brasil targets food waste at the distribution stage. The work of Full Belly Brasil includes collaboration with food distributors to recover food that would otherwise expire and then safely provides it to families in need. The organization also assembles and provides food baskets to families in need on a regular basis.
A Combined Approach
When asked how the work of Full Belly Brasil ties into ending poverty, Dewald demonstrated how successfully addressing survival needs enables people to pursue higher needs. Dewald described how there are a number of free-to-attend colleges in Brazil, some of which are the best in the country. If Brazilians are able to afford to finish high school, they can then attend college, attain a degree and be able to find well-paying work they would not have been able to find otherwise, breaking out of the poverty cycle. Dewald detailed why Full Belly Brasil chooses the communities it has. The organization works in these communities because of the presence of other local NGOs that provide after-school help, sports, language and or music lessons to students in the community.
Full Belly Brasil’s combined approach to reducing poverty, pairing its own food distribution capabilities with the educational capabilities of other NGOs, is an approach that has been effective and has the backing of a strong, generally applicable body of evidence. For instance, The Global Partnership for Education stated that an educated individual’s income increases by 10% for each year of schooling. For every dollar invested in an additional year of education, a person’s earnings increase by at least $2.50 in low to middle-income countries and up to $5 in lower-income countries. The benefits of Full Belly Brasil’s combined tactics in fighting poverty, surpass the scope of this article, but it is worth noting the benefits of this combined approach are widespread as they also improve gender equality, literacy and health.
Going Forward
In total, these combined efforts have resulted in extraordinary gains in establishing food security in Brazil. Dewald cited that Full Belly Brasil has already provided more than 72,000 pounds of food to families in need and that it did this with a rather minimal budget. This sets high hopes for the impact the organization could make with increased investment.
As for what is next for Full Belly Brasil, Dewald spoke on the organization’s continuance of operations in the communities it is already in, intentions to expand the organization’s work to other communities and embarking on new projects within these communities. One of these developments is Full Belly Brasil’s work on providing large water filtration systems for the indigenous communities in the state of Minas Gerais. This is an exciting and much-needed contribution as these indigenous communities depend on their rivers for water consumption, cooking and agricultural purposes. With these new filtration systems, these indigenous communities can enjoy their water free of contamination from local mining operations.
– Chester Lankford
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