School Meals Bolster Family Farming in Brazil
School Meals Bolster Family Farming in Brazil
By Mario Osava
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Children between the ages of five and seven eating lunch in the João Baptista Cáffaro School cafetería in the impoverished
Engenho Velho neighbourhood in the city of Itaboraí, 45 km from Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
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ITABORAÍ, Brazil, Nov 9 2015 (IPS) - “That law should have existed since the end of slavery, which threw slaves into the street without offering them adequate conditions for working and producing, turning them into semi-slaves,” said Brazilian farmer Idevan Correa.
The law he was referring to, which was passed in 2009, requires that at least 30 percent of the funds that municipal governments receive from the National Fund for the Development of Education go towards the purchase of food produced by local family farmers.
The formula is one of those discoveries that later seem obvious, self-evident, normal.
Besides guaranteeing small farmers an important market for their produce, “it improved the quality of the food,” the mother of two students, Jaqueline Lameira, who represents families on the Itaboraí School Feeding Council, which oversees the quality of school meals, told IPS.
Itaboraí, a municipality of 230,000 people in the southeast state of Rio de Janeiro, 11 percent of whose residents are rural, dedicates more than the required minimum.
Over 40 percent of school breakfasts and lunches served in the municipal schools are made up of food produced by local small farmers, said Inaiá Figueiredo, in charge of nutrition in the city government’s Secretariat of Agriculture, Supplies and Fishing.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/11/school-meals-bolster-family-farming-in-brazil/
