Climate Action 2011-2012

Sustainable agriculture
Climate Policy, governance & Finance
Blind spots and converging
agendas: climate and
food security
By Dr José Graziano da Silva, Director-General Elect,
UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
With the tendency towards ever-increasing specialisation,
it is becoming easier to be blind to situations in which
the actions that are taken within one subject area could
converge with those being applied by other people
working on seemingly different subjects. Because of this
blind spot, we are quite likely even to end up acting in
opposition to those with whom we should collaborate,
especially if we see ourselves as competing with them
for scarce resources or for political attention. The
tendency to concentrate on quite narrow goals, combined
with a widespread failure to identify possible areas of
convergence between different initiatives, could perhaps
be one of the causes for the disappointing performance
of many programmes and projects. With this in mind, it
is instructive to look at Brazil’s Zero Hunger programme
and consider its relevance to approaches towards meeting
future food needs, improving human health, preventing
the degradation of natural resources and slowing down
the processes of climate change.
The Zero hunger Programme
When President Lula da Silva launched Brazil’s Zero Hunger
programme in January 2003, many people claimed that it
was fiscally unaffordable, that welfare would compete for
funds better applied to development, that it would fuel
inflation, and that it would increase the dependency of the
poor on ‘handouts’.
The programme is
stimulating economic growth
where it is most needed, in
the poorest communities.
Their blind spot prevented them from being able to see
that emancipating the poor from hunger and resultant social
exclusion would, besides guaranteeing their human right to
food, actually open the way for development; and that there
was, in fact, a convergence between the hunger reduction
and the economic development agendas.
The idea that better nutrition can accelerate economic
growth is not a new one. The Nobel Prize-winning
economist Robert William Fogel claimed in The Escape
The Zero hunger programme in Brazil has been extremely
effective. An expanded school meals programme and
regular health checks are part of the programme.
from Hunger and Premature Death (2004) that “the
combined effect of the increase in dietary energy available
for work, and of the increased human efficiency in
transforming dietary energy into work output, appears
to account for about 50 per cent of the British economic
growth since 1790.”
The largest component of Zero Hunger and the one
which drew most criticism is its conditional cash transfer
programme, currently known as Bolsa Familia. It provides
over 12 million poor families with modest monthly grants,
that enable them to meet their basic food needs. Funds are
transferred by electronic card, wherever possible to an
adult woman in the recipient family. Beneficiaries are
required to keep their children in school and to have
regular health checks.
Eight years on, it is clear that the transfers are generating
high returns in terms of better health, lower child mortality,
less stunting, and higher levels of participation in the labour
market. The programme is stimulating economic growth
where it is most needed, in the poorest communities; the
wide income gap between rich and poor is shrinking, and
there have been massive reductions in the number of people
living in poverty and extreme poverty.
Moreover, through these grants and expanded school
meals programmes, Zero Hunger is translating the food
needs of the poor into incremental demand which, in turn,
induces growth in food production by small-scale farmers.
For many participants, Bolsa Familia represents a modernday
form of emancipation, not from slavery but from
dependence on water-lords, landlords and money-lenders.
© UNiesert
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