With an expected budget injection of R$ 500 million this year, the federal government relaunches this Wednesday (22) the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), which had changed its name and lost funds in recent years. The event will be held in the city of Recife (PE), with the presence of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Created at the beginning of Lula’s first term, in 2003, the PAA was part of the action known as Fome Zero and was instituted to encourage sustainable family farming by stimulating consumption of the sector’s production, mainly through purchases made by government agencies. public, carried out with waiver of bidding. The initiative also contributed to the formation of public stocks, helping to avoid the rise in prices of the main foodstuffs, in addition to encouraging healthy eating habits. “The program, without a doubt, was essential to remove Brazil from the Hunger Map in the past and has the potential to reverse hunger in the country, which currently affects more than 33 million people”, analyzes Vânia Marques Pinto, secretary of Agricultural Policy of the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Contag). “The original program changed its name, it was called Alimenta Brasil in the last government, it lost its budget and removed important lines, such as the issue of buying and distributing seeds to farmers”, she adds. One of the former beneficiaries affected by the change was Eudes Vilela Agripino, 37 years old, from Presidente Médici, a municipality in the interior of Rondônia, 420 km from Porto Velho. He presides over an association of 28 farming families that, since 2019, have been unable to access the program. He recalls how the PAA changed people’s lives. “We had that security for whoever sells our production. This gave a quality of life, many managed to save money to buy a motorcycle or even a cart”. The production of foods such as cassava, yam, gherkin, papaya, lemon, passion fruit and tangerine, among others, was distributed to nine institutions in the region, including public and municipal schools, hospitals, day care centers and shelters. “My nephew ate at schools. My own brother, my sister, they all fed on the products that came from our production”. Complete program Maira do Carmo Gonçalves, 55, a family farmer in Turmalina, in the Jequitinhonha Valley, in the north of Mias Gerais, is also proud to produce food purchased through the Food Acquisition Program. For her, it is one of the most complete programs that exist. “The PAA is very effective because it benefits both those who produce and those who receive the food basket. It’s a complete program.” In the Jequitinhonha Valley, according to Do Carmo, as she is known, around 80 municipalities are covered by the program, directly serving vulnerable families or supplying public institutions, such as schools and hospitals. Its production is focused on vegetables, fruits and cassava. News Among the news of the new PAA, which will be announced today, are the increase in the individual value that can be sold by farming families, facilitating access to indigenous peoples and quilombolas and prioritizing women and land reform settlers. Another novelty is the resumption of civil society participation in program management, through the Food Acquisition Program Manager (GGPAA) and the GGPAA Advisory Committee. Another collegiate that will be reinstalled is the National Council for Sustainable Rural Development (Condraf), in addition to the creation of the Program for the Productive and Economic Organization of Rural Women. “After successive budget cuts, the program was extinguished in 2021, changing its name to Programa Alimenta Brasil which, despite maintaining a structure very similar to that of the PAA, extinguished the Advisory Committee, the Program’s social control instance, and needs of important adjustments in the design, in order to guarantee legal security to the executors and greater effectiveness in its execution”, informed the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Agriculture (MDA), in a note sent to the report. “It should be noted, finally, that even with another name, the Program continued to be known as PAA among executors and beneficiaries, which justifies returning to the original nomenclature”, added the folder. Since it was created, the PAA has spent more than R$8 billion on food purchases, benefiting more than 500,000 family farmers and directing food to more than 8,000 entities served annually. Combating Hunger Central to the strategy to combat hunger in the country, the PAA should focus on distributing food to populations in a more vulnerable situation, identified according to social indicators. “Our idea is to focus the PAA more and more on families in the Single Registry and distribution so that it reaches more and more people who are hungry, with families with higher indicators of malnutrition and equipment that offer meals on the outskirts of large cities” , explains Lilian Rahal, national secretary for Food and Nutrition Security at the Ministry of Development and Social Assistance (MDS). The secretary also says that the program, from now on, will resume partnerships with producer organizations and cooperatives, which had been left aside in the previous government. “In recent years, the program stopped being operated with family farmers’ cooperatives and concentrated the operation in city halls and individual farmers. We are going to maintain the operation with the federated entities, but we want to expand the strategy of promoting cooperativism”. “I heard about one of the students at a school who received our baskets. And even on the day when he didn’t have classes, because it was a holiday, he would go to school to eat lunch, because there was no food at home, and he really liked the food that was offered there ”.
Agência Brasil
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