“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.” City of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

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At Tuesday’s report launch from the Trussell Tust, the Q&A focused on what can be done to prevent the rise in foodbanks. Currently, according to the findings of the report, our welfare system not only fails to prevent problems before they arise, it also struggles to deal with crisis. At Community Links we see this every day, with clients often needing food parcels due to benefit delays or some other crisis. The use of foodbanks continues to rise despite a reduction in sanctions, and it appears that foodbanks are increasingly being incorporated into the welfare system, as we previously feared.

Quite rightly, the discussion covered the need for the DWP to improve the benefits system as well as the expansion of foodbanks remits to include wider support and advice on debts, budgeting, and developing coping strategies. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that calls for central government to improve our welfare system are somewhat undermined by other crisis-causing policies. So what would an early action framework for food look like?

The city that ended hunger

The Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, known as the ‘city that ended hunger’, declared food a ‘right of citizenship’ in 1993. A city agency involving local people was established to devise solutions to end food poverty, including directly linking up farmers and consumers, establishing low-cost, high-quality ‘people’s restaurants’, and enabling extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes.

In only ten years, Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today the initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. In the same ten years, Belo Horizonte was the only locality in Brazil which saw a rise in the consumption of fresh fruit and veg and local small scale producers increased their revenue despite farmers in the rest of the country seeing incomes drop by almost 50%. The cost of these efforts? Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Reasons to be hopeful?

A differing economic and agricultural context means that the Belo Horizonte model may be difficult to directly replicate in the UK. Yet it demonstrates that significant action can be taken to reduce food poverty despite an unfavourable national context.

In the UK, the burgeoning ‘food sovereignty’ movement is equipping communities with the means of producing their own food, thereby reducing barriers to fresh fruit and veg in spite of spiralling food prices, and simultaneously delivering multiple social, emotional and health benefits. For example, the Women’s Environmental Network is running a number of projects in Tower Hamlets which are empowering local women to work together to access affordable fresh food, whilst improving their physical and mental wellbeing and combating social exclusion.

Of course, such projects are generally small-scale and the structural conditions in which they operate, such as deprivation and job insecurity, also need to be addressed to achieve lasting change. Sustain’s campaign, ‘Beyond the Foodbank’, calls on central government to improve the benefits system, but also advocates for local living wages and city-level partnerships to address the root causes of food poverty in their locality.

This kind of systems change is already ongoing at Brighton & Hove City Council, who have relatively recently adopted a Food Poverty Strategy and Action Plan, co-produced with the local population and delivered by a wide range of local agencies. The plan has a distinct flavour of early action, recognising that the city needs to address food poverty now to save major costs later on arising from poor mental and physical health, poor educational attainment, obesity and malnutrition. Promisingly, a number of other councils have since replicated the model.

From passive recipients to active citizens

Evidently, whilst central government continues to deny any link between issues with benefits and the rise in food banks, there are still actions we can undertake to reduce food poverty; building people’s resilience and enabling them to lead thriving lives. Services shouldn’t reduce people to passive recipients but enable them to have active control over their own lives so they’re prepared to deal with setbacks and seize opportunities as they arise. And emergency food aid should remain just that.

Original source – linksUK

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