• Politiche di rafforzamento dell'agricoltura famili

In the last two decades, Brazil distinguished itself for its political efforts aiming to foster social inclusion, through a series of public policies. Great interest has particularly arisen around for its anti-poverty initiatives. In 2003 the Brazilian government launched the Fome Zero program, presenting the institutional food purchasing program as a crucial tool in the fight against malnutrition and as a market access strategy for small-scale producers.
This research project intends to contribute to the analysis and comprehension of the evolution of the brazilian public policies in relation to the process leading to the recognition of family farming as a social category and strategic sector in the field of food security. It focuses on the study of the Food Acquisition Programme, PAA (Programa de Aquisiçao de Alimentos) and its implementation in the city region of Porto Alegre, Brazil.
The PAA, implemented in 2003 by the federal government, was created as a public policy for the institutional purchase of food produced by family farming and intended to promote food and nutrition security. This program is one of the Fome Zero plan central axes and resulted from the confluence of two great debates that have animated Brazil, during the decade of 1990s. The first focused on the fight against hunger and the construction of a political food security plan, going beyond the simple right to food. This discussion intensified since the late 80s, gained a boost in the 90s, in conjunction with an intense mobilization by civil society, and met more space in the Lula government. The second debate is about the recognition of family farming as a social category by the Brazilian state, a sector that had hardly never been considered as a potential recipient of specific public policies until then. The discussion established since the 90s, as result of several critical expressions to hegemonic model of brazilian agricultural production, permitted to create the conditions for developing changes concerning the family farming productive matrix into the process of formation of the PAA.
For producing deliverable, as well as a bibliographic research aimed to provide an insight on the state of art related to the topic presented above, the research project includes fieldwork in the city region of Porto Alegre: visits to several farms and producers’ organizations, collecting information and testimonies through dialogues held with several agricultural producers, known during the stay in Brazil.