Family farming producers and leaders of solidarity kitchens celebrate World Food Day this Friday (16) with the certainty that it is possible to keep Brazil off the Hunger Map through collective effort.
In July of this year, the United Nations reaffirmed that the country kept the percentage of its undernourished population below 2.5% over the last three years.
This was possible thanks to the work of people like Dona Maria do Cerrado, a community leader at the head of the Cozinha Solidária Cantinho da Vovó (Grandma's Corner Solidarity Kitchen) in Brasília, which feeds more than 800 people in situations of vulnerability.
Three times a week, Dona Maria and 37 other volunteers take turns sorting, storing, and preparing food, setting the tables, and welcoming those who arrive seeking not only food but also a sense of belonging.
Dona Maria says that many family problems and even cases of violence are resolved around the table.
"It's the moment when we come together to talk here inside this space that feeds, where we treat food as sacred, as healing. That's why it's done with great care," she says.
The place also delivers 200 basic food baskets to the most vulnerable registered families. All of this only became possible after the Cozinha Solidária Cantinho da Vovó began receiving fruits, greens, vegetables, and other produce directly from producers like Hosana Alves do Nascimento.
The daughter of family farmers, she managed to transform an urban area in São Sebastião, a satellite city of the Federal District, into an agroforestry system that produces short-cycle crops, such as vegetables, greens, and roots, alongside fruit trees and oilseed plants.
"Since it's a small area, we optimized it to yield a lot. Our production is considered agroecological because no pesticides are used," she says.
The connection between the producer and the kitchen that serves the final food came about through the Food Acquisition Program, a public policy of the Ministry of Agrarian Development that purchases food and supplies it to solidarity kitchens. These, in turn, are part of another public policy, from the Ministry of Social Development, aimed at serving people in situations of food insecurity.
According to Lilian Rahal, Secretary of Food and Nutritional Security at the Ministry of Social Development, creating this link between different people allows food to reach those who need it.
"This partnership enables us to deliver real food, food produced by family farming, healthy food, to regions where the state cannot always be present through its institutions," she says.
In addition to ensuring healthy food, the coordination between different social actors also makes it possible to offer a greater variety of foods to those in need.
Hosana, who has always been familiar with different foods because of her experience with cultivation, never imagined that many people did not have access even to the most common ones.
"During one of the deliveries, a little boy asked his mother: 'Are we going to eat watermelon?' That hurt me inside, that a child did not have access to a simple watermelon," the producer recounts.
The Minister of Agrarian Development, Fernanda Machiaveli, recalls that this work of combating food insecurity began when Brazil was still on the Hunger Map and came from civil society itself, "which organized itself during the pandemic and created these solidarity kitchen spaces."