It’s lunchtime at Presidente Costa E Silva high school in Irati, a rural town in southeastern Brazil, and today’s menu would make Jamie Oliver drool.
Students file down the line and heap their plates with rice, beans, stewed beef, and the ever-present farofa; toasted cassava flour used as a topping on just about every Brazilian dish. There are big plastic tubs of tomato salad, green salad, and corn on the cob, which empty almost as soon as they’re refilled by one of the school’s four cooks on duty. For dessert, they put out bowls of fresh whole strawberries. Almost everybody takes some of everything, and as long as they finish what’s on their plate, they can go back for more.
“It’s not mom’s cooking,” said Luis Henrique, 17. “But it’s good.”
Brazil’s national school meal program, known here as the PNAE (Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar) is beginning to gain a reputation outside the country in a world increasingly concerned with nutrition and eating local. Although the program has existed since 1955, it has radically shifted directions in the past six years, thanks to a law that mandates that at least 30 per cent of the products purchased for school meals must be from smallholder farmers.
The result has been a boon for rural economic development — and also an influx of fresh fruits and vegetables for the first generation of Brazilians to struggle with diabetes and obesity.
But these benefits have not been felt equally across this vast and diverse country. While some states and municipalities have exceeded requirements under the PNAE, others struggle to meet the minimum. Under a program that is ostensibly universal, lunch looks very different for kids depending on where they live.
WWhen Brazil first launched its school feeding program, it was largely a humanitarian effort. At the time, almost half the country’s children suffered from hunger and malnutrition. Thanks in part to this program, and other “pro-poor” policies reinforced in the early 2000s by then president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, only about seven percent of the population in 2012 suffered from malnutrition.
But by then, Brazil had other health problems — namely, that diabetes and obesity were on the rise. Nutritionists had become increasingly critical of the poor quality of food students were receiving. Meanwhile, smallholder farmers were pushing the government for the kinds of subsidies that were being poured into big agribusiness.
In 2009, Lula’s government passed a law that required that at least 30 per cent of the food purchased through the program must be bought from smallholder farmers.
That was followed with a resolution that increased the amount of funding for food from 22 to 30 centavos (about ten cents US) per student per day. Although that’s a tiny amount — and government officials stress that the PNAE is a supplementary policy that should complement what states and municipalities already provide — it adds up to $3.5 billion Real ($1.75 billion USD) a year.
This law was “hugely important” in changing the type of food that schools offered, according to Daniel Silva Balaban, director of the World Food Programme’s Centre of Excellence Against Hunger. At the time it was passed, he was president of the FNDE (Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Educação), the federal agency that transfers school funds to state and municipal governments.
For most of the PNAE’s history, he said, the prerogative was just to “give food to kids, whether it was nutritious or not.” The menus were set by the federal government, and were the same across the country. Foreign aid agencies donated staples, including powdered milk and rice, and what did come from within the country was purchased from large food manufacturers and producers.
“Almost everything was processed, because that was easier to do in terms of logistics,” says Balaban. “With the [new] law saying that you need to purchase directly from the small farmers, we could take vegetables, fresh fruits, eggs, yogurt, milk, and a lot of other important things, very fresh from the smallholder farmers and offer to the kids.”
“W “When I was in school, I remember seeing boxes of powdered milk that had the sticker of the United States government on it,” said George Luiz Alves Barbosa, a physical education teacher who helps oversee school feeding in the southern state of Paraná. “Usually, the meal was soup. Kids would sometimes bring vegetables from home to throw in, and sometimes the principal would pitch in money. It was very precarious.”
“At my school now,” he continued, “the satisfaction is high and parents and students speak well of the food. We joke that the agricultura familiar [family farming] was the spice that was missing.”
For farmers in Paraná and neighboring states, the program has meant a welcome surplus of money. According to Marcia Cristina Stolarski, who coordinates school feeding for the state, the secretary of education allocated 41 per cent of the budget, about $40 million R ($11.4 million US), to family farmers — exceeding legal requirements.
Oscar Augusto Orshel is one of these farmers. He lives on an 11-hectare farm just outside of Irati. The land has been in his family since his grandparents came from Poland in the 1920s; his mother, Catarina, remembers going to local markets as a child to help sell produce every weekend. Until recently, that was how the farm sustained itself. “We survived, but barely,” said Orshel.
Three years ago, he joined a farmers’ cooperative that contracts with schools in the region. He’s one of 30 farmers who produce fruits, vegetables and bread for 57 elementary and secondary schools in the region. Twelve per cent of what they earn goes back into the cooperative; last year, he said, they were able to hire a driver to make school deliveries.
Last year, about 50 per cent of the farm’s income, $40,000 R ($11,400 US), came from these contracts. He showed off the tractor he was able to buy, as well as a new house for his mother and sisters he was able to build on the property.
“All of this,” Orshel told me, “is thanks to the PNAE. I know I have a market. I know I have demand. And I know my work is being valued.”
SSince the law passed in 2009, teachers, principals, and school cooks across Brazil told me that school meals have improved. There’s more variety and larger quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables. But there is still a big gap in the quality of school meals in wealthier states in the south and southeast, like Paraná, and poorer states in the north and northeast.
At a secondary school near the northeastern city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia, lunch is a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup. It’s tasty, but a far cry from the all-you-can-eat buffet in Irati.
The kids we talked to said the food was generally good, but boring. “We want more fruits,” said one girl. “More variety. But Marina does miracles with what she gets.”
Marina Sancho Gonçales da Silva, 47, has run the cafeteria here since 2007. She says she feels good when the kids tell her they like her food — “some say it’s even better than what they get at home” — but the federal government’s funding is insufficient. “There’s no money for snacks, which students request, and sometimes we want to make something but we don’t have the material.”
She pointed to a bag of wilted vegetables that arrived from one of the family farmers the state contracts. So far, the quality has not been consistently good. “Sometimes the produce arrives and it’s already gone bad,” she said. “We return it. We’ve complained to the secretary of education, but not much has changed.”
Here in Bahia, a coastal state with a relatively strong economy but huge income inequality (roughly 40 per cent of households live below the poverty line), they’re still working to get to the minimum requirements. Last year, 19 per cent of school food was purchased from family farmers — which, it should be noted, is a vast improvement over the previous year at just six per cent.
WWhile the law has had a positive impact in places like Paraná, that’s not true in many other parts of the country, like Bahia. Nationally, the average rate of compliance to the law is only 17.9 per cent, according to research from the International Policy Centre for Sustainable Development—meaning that most of the country is still sourcing its school food from processed food manufacturers.
The reason why the law has had such an uneven effect across Brazil comes down to a mixture of geography, local government priorities, and the farmers themselves. Bahia and other northern states are challenged by the fact that they have much bigger distances to cover than the more densely populated southern and southeastern area of Brazil, making logistics and distribution difficult. The agricultural sector there is more focused on commodity crops and big agri-business, and small-scale farmers are less likely to be part of cooperatives or associations.
There’s also been less enthusiasm from some local governments. In Paraná, the state government works with extension officers to help local farmers tap into the school feeding program. In Bahia, that technical assistance is weak or nonexistent.
But farmers there are beginning to get more organized. Eleneiole Alves Cordeiro is the president of Arco-Sertão,, a cooperative about two hours drive from Salvador. The cooperative was formed just three years ago, and has grown to become a network of 47 small co-operatives representing some 8,000 smallholder farms in the region. Last year, they supplied fruits, vegetables, and bread to between 30 and 50 schools.
Farmer co-operatives — like Orshel’s in Paraná — can also ease the administrative burdens of participating in the school feeding program. There are around 34 different application forms to fill out, and if a proposal is accepted, there’s more tracking paperwork to follow.
Cordeiro says the PNAE has “opened doors for our products” simply by opening up market access across the state of Bahia. But she believes the amount offered through the program is too low. “It’s not a price that is justified,” she said. “Almost all our producers are complaining.”
They’re not the only ones. In Brasilia, the country’s capital, state nutritionists told me that the cost of one nutritious meal per day is actually 46 centavos per student, and that they make up the loss by relying on student absences. Even in Paraná, whose well-developed network of cooperatives and dense geography make transportation costs more manageable, the state has to pay on top of what’s allocated by the federal government to meet nutrition and local purchasing requirements.
Thus far, they’ve been able to cover the difference with a budget surplus said Stolarski. “But now,” she said, “the surplus is almost gone.” Inflation rates are skyrocketing in Brazil amid major political turmoil. The price offered by PNAE for school food — 30 centavos per day, per student — has not changed since 2009.
Blaiton Carvalho da Silva is a regional director with EMATER (Empresa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural), a government agency that works on rural social and economic development. They operate nationally, with more than 24,000 extension officers, and da Silva has seen firsthand how PNAE has been implemented across the country.
When I asked him about the future of the program, he laughed. “Last year, I would have told you something different.” he said. “Today, resources all over are being cut, all over, little by little.” But despite this, he’s optimistic and believes the program has radically shifted how people think of school food, nutrition, and the family farmer. “We’re not regressing,” he said. “The paradigm has changed.”
This reporting was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
