Food security requires collective effort and coordination

Family farming producers and solidarity kitchen leaders celebrate World Food Day, this Friday (16), with the certainty that it is possible to keep Brazil off the Hunger Map through collective effort.

In July this year, the United Nations reaffirmed that the country had kept the percentage of the undernourished population below 2.5% in the last three years.

This was possible thanks to the work of people like Dona Maria do Cerrado, community leader at the head of the Cantinho da Vovó Solidarity Kitchen, in Brasília, which feeds more than 800 people in vulnerable situations.

Three times a week, Dona Maria and 37 other volunteers take turns separating, storing and preparing food, setting tables and welcoming those who arrive in search of not only food, but also hospitality.

Dona Maria says that many family problems and even cases of violence are resolved around the table.

"It's the moment when we come together to talk here within this space that nourishes, where we worship food as sacred, as healing. Therefore, it is done with great care", he says.

The place also delivers 200 basic food baskets to the most vulnerable registered families. All of this was only possible after Cozinha Solidária Cantinho da Vovó began to receive fruits, vegetables and vegetables directly from producers such as Hosana Alves do Nascimento.

Daughter of family farmers, she managed to transform an urban area in São Sebastião, a satellite city in the Federal District, into an agroforestry system that produces short-term crops, such as vegetables, greens and roots, along with fruit and oilseed trees.

"As it is a small area, we optimized it to produce a lot. Our production is considered agroecological, because it does not use poisons", he says.

The coordination between the producer and the kitchen that offers the final food occurred through the Food Acquisition Program, a public policy of the Ministry of Agrarian Development that purchases food and supplies it to solidarity kitchens. These, in turn, are part of another public policy, from the Ministry of Social Development, aimed at serving people in situations of food vulnerability.

According to Lilian Rahal, Secretary of Food and Nutritional Security at the Ministry of Social Development, the creation of this link between different people allows food to reach those who need it.

“This partnership allows us to deliver real food, food produced by family farming, healthy food, in regions where the State is not always able to be present through its institutions”, he says.

In addition to ensuring healthy food, the coordination between different social actors also makes it possible to offer a greater variety of food to those in need.

Hosana, who always knew different foods because of her experience with cultivation, had no idea that many people did not have access to even the most common foods.

“In one of the deliveries, a little boy asked his mother: ‘Are we going to eat watermelon?’ That hurt me inside, that the child didn’t have access to a simple watermelon”, says the producer.