Scaling Up Local Development Initiatives: Brazil's Food Acquisition Programme

Abstract

Global poverty largely remains a rural phenomenon. Close to 70 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty inhabit rural areas (IFAD, 2011). Further, agriculture is found to be a source of livelihood for over 80 per cent of rural people, highlighting the importance of supporting this activity as a means to fight poverty (World Bank, 2007; IFAD, 2011). This is darkly ironic: rural areas are where most of the world’s food is produced and also where the majority of the world’s extreme poor and malnourished reside. Poverty in rural areas stems from a diverse set of shortcomings such as: lack of adequate public investments in infrastructure, storage and market facilities coupled with disadvantages rooted in historical inequities, agricultural, land tenure and credit policies and economic factors that have a bearing on the distribution of assets, productive resources and access to credit and markets. Rural livelihoods are also based on a wide range of activities ranging from agricultural production to off-farm wage labour, and these vary across agro-climatic zones, land tenure arrangements, regions and cultures. The growing frequency of extreme weather events and recent increases in global financial and commodity price volatility—with sharp price rises particularly since 2006 (FAO et. al., 2011: 8)—have heightened the obstacles that rural producers, particularly poor, already face in many regions and have also contributed to severe localised food insecurity.