X-e. Brazil
The preceding subsections on India, the United States, and Ghana illustrated applications of the human rights approach to food and nutrition in nations with well-established, stable governments. The South Africa story is about a nation that recently completed a major transition, ending apartheid and moving toward a human rights-oriented form of governance. Here, however, our story about Brazil begins earlier, and describes the efforts to make that sort of transformation. The movement for recognition of nutrition rights in Brazil exemplifies the sort of social movement described earlier, in Subsection III-k, on Informal Civil Society. That movement originated with what Stammers describes as a "pre-institutionalised, non-legal" understanding of rights.
Brazil has been making steady progress toward democratization and human rights-based governance, propelled by civil society since the early 1970s. Workers' strikes in the late 1970s were decisive in breaking the grip of the authoritarian state and creating a space for public action. The early 1980s were marked by demonstrations for direct elections. The federal constitution was rewritten in 1988. The first democratically elected president, Collor de Mello, was impeached in 1992 for corruption, providing clear evidence that the voice of the people was being heard. (Valente 1999).
Following the impeachment, in early 1993, the Movement for Ethics in Politics called for an end to corruption, hunger, poverty, and social exclusion. The civil society organization A��o da Cidadania was created, often described as Citizenship Action Against Hunger, Poverty, and for Life. Its basic principles had a strong human rights orientation:
Basic Principles of Citizenship Action
- The non-acceptance that a fellow human being could be dying of hunger at your doorstep. Something should be done immediately while we look for a mid or long term solution.
- Having access to quality food, according to their cultural preferences, is a right of all human beings. Food cannot be used as a political weapon to submit people to the interests of the donors. Any donation, therefore, must be associated with mechanisms that empower people to be able to feed themselves as soon as possible.
- The need to give name and address to the hungry and in need, to make possible immediate action (hunger mapping).
- The responsibility of overcoming poverty and hunger as a responsibility of every citizen. As long as human beings do not have their humanity fulfilled, no human being can fully enjoy our own humanity. Only with continuous solidarity can exclusion be overcome.
- The State does not have the out-reach nor the needed agility to face alone– with its traditional mechanisms - the seriousness and breadth of the human problems posed by structural socioeconomic "apartheid".
- New governance mechanisms are needed through administrative and financial decentralization; increased civil society participation in the management of public policies and programs, at all levels; the identification of new mechanisms of partnership among civil society organizations, market and governmental institutions; and broad solidarity among the people.
- The State has the obligation to provide public funds to facilitate these partnerships and provide conditions – through appropriate public policies - for people to develop their own capacity to overcome exclusion.
Citizenship Action had about 7,000 local committees, and involved more than 30 million people, or about 20% of Brazil's population. Alone or in partnership with government agencies, these committees undertook many different kinds of actions: food distribution, capacity building, urban vegetable gardens, income and job generation projects, professional training, reintegration of street children, support for agrarian reform, literacy programs, popular education, etc. All of these actions were based on recognition of "the fundamental need to empower people to find their own way out of exclusion and hunger".
The vigorous mobilization of civil society contributed to the creation, also in 1993, of the National Food Security Council, CONSEA. It was composed of 10 State Ministers and 21 representatives selected by civil society. Its head, a representative of civil society, reported directly to the nation's president. Early in 1993 the president launched the new Plano de Combate � Fome e a Mis�ria, the Plan to Combat Poverty and Hunger.
CONSEA and Citizenship Action joint proposed measures to use public food stocks to feed the poor, generate jobs an income, speed up agrarian reform, promote administrative and financial decentralization, coordinate actions against malnutrition and infant mortality, combat corruption, and many other initiatives.
In 1994 CONSEA and Citizenship Action organized the first National Food Security Conference. Funded by the federal government, and preceded by state level conferences, it drew more than 2,000 delegates from all walks of life to discuss the eradication of hunger, poverty, and social exclusion. The conference agreed that food and nutritional security means "guaranteeing the right of everyone to feed oneself and to become a fully empowered human being, and that food and nutritional security should be one of the centrepieces of the national social and economic development strategy." However, at this stage this thinking was not embedded into the framework of global human rights.
In 1995, the newly elected government discontinued CONSEA, and in its place created the Comunidade Solid�ria council. It incorporated CONSEA experience and values, and created a new agency within the government for establishing partnerships with civil society. Combating hunger and poverty is one of its main goals, and for this purpose it is working to develop a new national food security policy.
In 1996 the National Human Rights Programme was established. Like comparable initiatives in other countries, its initial focus has been on civil and political rights. It has not yet given substantial attention to economic, social and cultural rights.
The first steps toward merger of the food security movement mad the human rights movement in Brazil occurred in the context of its preparations for the World Food Summit of 1996. In that broad consultative process, Citizenship Action established conceptual links between between the right to food in particular and human rights generally, and discussed way in which these rights could be implemented through the nation's food and nutrition security policy.
Comunidade Solid�ria is the focal point for the national follow-up for the World Food Summit. Its Executive Secretariat is coordinating a broad-based ongoing national discussion of the ways in which they food security movement and the human rights movements can be joined together.
In early 1998 Brazil's Ministry of Health reviewed the National Food and Nutrition Policy. The draft proposals were examined in a two-day conference involving representatives of many different elements of civil society. There was clear consensus on the recognition of the human right to food and nutrition. A special working group was established, with broad representation from government and from civil society, to draft a new policy that systematically incorporates the human rights approach. Although the new food and nutrition policy has not yet been finalized, it will be strongly based on human rights considerations.
Leaders of the movement drew out some of the key lessons learned from the Brazil experience. They formulated five key points regarding state/society partnership in the social movement:
- Citizenship Action Against Hunger, Poverty, and for Life did not characterise itself as a political opposition, nor as a pro-government movement. It gathered people from all sectors whose actions essentially aimed at improving peoples lives Millions were mobilized by the values of partnership and solidarity.
- Government leaders showed themselves open to dialogue with society, creating negotiation fora, and releasing resources (financial, human and material) for the financing of Citizenship Action;
- Communication media, non-governmental institutions, entrepreneurs, artists and others mobilised themselves based on the core understanding that links the strengthening of democracy to the fight against hunger. It was recognized that the fight against hunger should be faced not only as a socio-economic question, but above all as an ethical one: after all, the hunger of millions of people blemishes the dignity of a whole nation. If its causes were due to historical processes, then its continuation would also be sustained by the indifference of those who share the same roads and cities as the indigent. Thus, the fight against hunger would be equally a fight to raise social awareness, solidarity and partnership as being the basic values to be strengthened.
- It was realized that the State alone could no longer adequately solve the problems of hunger and poverty in the country: only the union of efforts of State and Society would be capable of making available the resources required to reverse the social injustice situation in Brazil. This argument gained strength with the understanding that partnership meant equality of status for the partners and their free association, without subordination, as much in the elaboration as in the implementation and monitoring of public policies (Valente 1999).
Although the work is not yet done, it has become clear that the human rights approach now guides the formulation of Brazil's national food and nutrition policy. The experience in Brazil provides useful guidance for the formation of comparable social movements elsewhere.
Subsection X-e last updated on September 26, 1999