Brazil’s Humanitarian Food Cooperation: From an Innovative Policy to the Politics of Traditional Aid

Abstract

Brazil had donated food abroad on previous occasions, but an institutionalized humanitarian food aid policy was something innovative in its history. The original goal was to connect the produce of the small family farmers to an international humanitarian policy. However, in practice, the donations privileged the commodities of the large agribusiness farms. This article explains the political economy that diverted the policy from its original social purpose and made Brazil one of the five biggest donors of food to the World Food Program for a short period of time.

“One Single Agriculture”: Dismantling Policies and Silencing Peasant Family Farmers in Brazilian Foreign Policy (2016-2022)

“…However, far from having solved the agricultural duality, BFP under Lula and Rousseff echoed the tensions and contradictions of domestic politics in the agri-food field. This was evident in multilateral trade negotiations (Ramanzini Jr. and Lima 2011), humanitarian food aid (Lima 2020), and in Brazil's international development cooperation. Programs such as More Food International and, even more so, ProSavana with African countries like Mozambique, generated different types of civil society contestation, including campaigns and protests, against development cooperation initiatives perceived as promoting agribusiness-like monoculture farming (Cesarino 2015;Shankland and Gonçalves 2016).…”

“…A major site for these voices to be included in foreign policymaking was CGFome. Created in 2004, CGFome was a division within Itamaraty responsible for promoting Brazilian policies to combat hunger and poverty abroad (Lima 2020). Inspired by Brazil's own Zero Hunger Program, many of these policies focused on peasant family farming, and CGFome worked in close collaboration with social movements in this field.…”