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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, OWL-OldWaysLiving@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Home-grown food in schools for a green economy
  • Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:40:57 -0700


Home-grown food in schools for a green economy
by Kei Otsuki on November 18, 2011
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/home-grown-food-in-schools-for-a-green-economy/

As next June’s Rio+20 summit on sustainable development approaches,
discussions about how to effectively establish a green economy are surging.
But as a recent conference of the United Nations Institute for Social
Development emphasized, the green economy is not simply about the economy and
environment. Rather, it requires a deeper restructuring of economic and
social processes including people’s relationships with food and agriculture.

Debates on food safety, which arose at the end of the 1990s due to the
controversies over bovine spongiform encephalopathy, avian flu and
genetically modified crops, as well as health problems associated with modern
eating habits (such as obesity), have propelled interest in healthy local
food in both developed and developing countries.

The safety and quality of food used in school meals has drawn particular
attention because the primary consumers of the service (children) cannot
evaluate the quality of the food they are eating.

Photo by Judy Baxter.

A study published earlier this year in the United Kingdom shows that, in
addition to health benefits, the quest to improve the quality of school meals
(led by the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver) has contributed to improving test
scores and decreasing absenteeism.

And a recent International Food Policy Research Institute review of food for
education illustrates how securing adequate quantity and quality of food for
school meals is vital to achieving education for all, because in many
developing countries, the school meal is the main — if not the only — meal
of the day for many schoolchildren. Good quality school food guarantees
school attendance and good educational outcomes.

Home-grown elements and localisation

The Home-grown School Feeding Programme is an international initiative led by
the UN World Food Programme (WFP), and shows a unique institutional
experiment in promoting a green economy by linking public sector food
procurement to sustainable agriculture.

WFP’s focus on promoting ‘home-grown’ elements in school meals is innovative
because it intends to link people’s concerns about the quality of school
meals and education to sustainable agricultural development. In particular,
the programme aims to promote ‘localisation’ of food production, distribution
and consumption, and significant empowerment of consumers (such as parents
and teachers) and local farmers so that they can start to negotiate with
local authorities to procure local produce for school meals. From an
environmental sustainability perspective, localisation is also recommended
given that it reduces food’s ecological footprint.

Japan, for example, has been promoting localisation — known as 'chisan
chishou' (literally, local production and local consumption) — in its
national school feeding program.

A lesson on local vegetables in an elementary school in Japan.

Japan, for example, has been promoting localisation — known as chisan chishou
(literally, local production and local consumption) — in its national school
feeding program. This system has worked to connect schools to local farming
or fishing communities, and it is intended to nurture children’s familiarity
with local culture, food industries and the environment.

A model from Brazil

Brazil is considered to have an exemplary home-grown school feeding
programme. It has successfully rearranged public and private institutions in
such a way as to empower social actors like consumers, farmers and public
authorities at various levels to define their own terms of engagement to
improve the quality of school meals.

Initially, the national school feeding programme in Brazil was a highly
centralized program. Starting in the 1950s, the central government procured
food for schools, mostly non-perishable cereals and powdered milk. It stored
the food in warehouses in state capitals from where it was distributed to
interior areas. However, due to the precarious transportation and storage
facilities at the time, even the non-perishable and processed foods often
spoiled before they reached children.

In 1997, decentralisation saw budgets for school meals transferred from the
central government to municipal governments, enabling local authorities to
procure food for public schools. In 2006, under President Lula da Silva’s
Worker’s Party regime, which has kept close contact with landless and
family-based small farmers’ movements, the National Food Security and
Nutrition Programme started to promote the idea that secure access to a
sufficient quantity of good quality food was a human right to be protected by
the government. This idea was rapidly linked to the concept of “food
sovereignty” underpinned by appreciation of local food culture and
family-based agriculture.

Then in 2009, a new law came into effect to fully implement the ‘home-grown’
school feeding by obliging every municipality in Brazil to spend at least 30%
of its allocated budget to procure local produce directly from family farms.
Since then, about half of the more than 5,500 municipalities in Brazil have
their own designated School Feeding Committees, which consist of the
municipal and state secretaries of education, town councillors, and
representatives from local Parents and Teachers Associations.

These school feeding committees are now taking the lead in local food
procurement and ensuring school menus reflect the voices of local children
and their parents. In relatively developed municipalities in the south and
southeast of Brazil, various channels have been established to include
locally procured fresh vegetables and fruits in the menus.

For example, in 2008 in the municipality of Campinas in the state of São
Paulo, the school feeding committee partnered with the municipality’s central
wholesale market to provide 164,000 children from 500 schools with school
meals using fresh vegetables, fruits and milk, which are procured from local
farmers. Today, the municipal market employs 10 nutritionists who are
responsible for helping schools to develop menus.

In Brazil, outstanding localized school feeding practices are recognized
annually by the government-backed programme known as Zero Hunger Action (Ação
Fome Zero). Over 30 municipalities are nominated each year, providing
incentives to improve the quality of school meals. This year, the
municipality of Quixaba in the northeastern state of Paraiba, one of the
poorest regions in Brazil, has been short-listed for the award, as its local
committee started to use local produce procured from family-based small farms.

Since many small farmers, especially those who had been recently given land
as a result of agrarian reform, do not have access to infrastructure for
effective commercialization of their produce, the school feeding programme
provides an avenue to boost local agricultural development and help alleviate
rural poverty.

Localisation of Brazil’s national school feeding programme has led to a
flexible form of national governance that connects local citizens, including
producers and consumers, and various local organizations to municipalities
and then to multiple national authorities.

Rather than dictating top-down, one-size-fits-all policies from the capital
Brasilia, the central government today acts as a duty-bearer who monitors the
transparency of local school feeding committees’ financial operations and
compliance with federal guidelines. For their parts, the local committees can
always demand that the central government improve basic infrastructure and
extension services for family-based small-scale producers and distributors to
be able to regularly supply quality foods.

Perhaps as a first step to ensuring that a green economy takes into account
social equity, we need to start with the notion, taking shape in Brazil and
other countries, that we all have the right to fair and transparent
governance that guarantees good quality food.





  • [Livingontheland] Home-grown food in schools for a green economy, Tradingpost, 11/20/2011

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