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and mutual accountability—precisely the three features I see as foundational in
a true living democracy aligned with what brings out our best and therefore is
powerful enough to end hunger.
You spoke of Brazil, a country full of lessons for all of us, and the
particular case of Belo Horizonte. In 1993 the city elected a mayor on the
platform of the right to food. For this administration, the right to food, which
ultimately became a principle in the Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) campaign, meant
not just making better ”soup kitchens.” It meant that even those who are poor
are still citizens; therefore, the government is still accountable to them. It must
make the market work for them, too. A goal was to create a market fair and open
enough that all could participate in it. The administration involved many people
and diverse sectors of society in devising its many programmes.
It is important to acknowledge that the city’s mayor had not been elected
out of the blue, of course. His victory was a result of diligent, courageous political
and social movements, which came together in the first years of the 1980s to
form a new political party, the Workers’ Party. To ensure that the Party did not
lose touch with the people, it required members to keep up their participation
in their respective social movements, so that they would remain accountable to
them, too.
Over time, the Workers Party was able to elect people into a variety
of offices at the municipal level, and ultimately to elect President Ignacio Lula
da Silva. From that process emerged new safety-net programmes, such as the
‘bolsa familia’ providing a stipend for low-income families that keep their children
in school and make sure they have medical care. With many other aspects,
these programmes resulted in Brazil’s successfully cutting poverty by a quarter
in about a decade, a striking accomplishment. And in Belo Horizonte the infant
death rate fallen by half since the right-to-food initiatives got underway.
The Brazil experience illustrates the power of social movements coming
together with a common vision in which the right to food is embedded in the
concept of engaged, living democracy. By living democracy I mean removing
the power of private wealth from control of public decision making, as well
as democratising economies through, for example, cooperatives, and through
local-to-global collaborative decision making —all critical for the four pillars to
be realised.
The realisation of these pillars requires that, together, we find greater
courage to step up, to name the power of money in the current system as a
primary obstacle to real, living democracy; and to spread compelling examples
of how it is possible remove it. Olivier De Schutter, thank you for the courage that
you embody. You teach us all. Because solutions are known to virtually all of our
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