Books face hunger in post-war Brazil and in times of ‘agro pop’

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The lack of adequate public policies, rising food prices and people looking for truckloads of bones seem to make reading “Geografia da Fome – O Dilema Brasileiro: Pão ou Aço” sadly current, a classic by the writer Josué de Castro, which won a new edition in 2022 and a rereading, the collection of articles “From Hunger to Hunger: Dialogues with Josué de Castro”.

The first is the re-edition of a work that changed the way the problem of hunger would be understood and was originally launched in 1946, still from the rubble of the Second World War and in the climate of re-democratization, after the Estado Novo dictatorship.

Castro not only created a classic but helped break the belief that food shortages were the result of scarce natural resources or population characteristics. He investigated what led Brazil, with its generous and fertile lands, to starve.

It is not the same thing, as he very well showed, hunger in the sugarcane Northeast and in the arid Northeast. He also showed that in the past famine was the result of war, of the difficulty of transportation. Today, we have easy transportation and hunger is not localized, it has become general.

Through political, cultural and economic aspects, Josué de Castro unravels the characteristics and food needs of the population of the Amazon, of the sugar-growing Northeast, of the northeastern hinterland, of the Midwest and of the South.

He compares the situation of populations from different realities, but which have hunger as a common trait. A family from the northeastern hinterland and another that depends on the cultivation of sugarcane on the coast, for example, can experience similar situations of malnutrition, even living in areas with different conditions.

It becomes impossible to dissociate the penury of the population of the Zona da Mata from the aggressive process of colonization and implementation of the sugarcane monoculture, which was swallowing up the small crops of grains, fruits and vegetables, replacing them with the monotonous landscape. of the mills and impacting the eating habits of the population.

Hunger, therefore, would appear more as a political-economic decision, a social problem, not being the unavoidable result of a climatic issue or other adverse geographic conditions.

A doctor and specialist in nutrition, Josué de Castro (1908-1973) was also Brazil’s ambassador to the UN (United Nations). He became a federal deputy and lost his political rights with the military coup of 1964. He died in exile, in Paris.

Perhaps the sensitivity to the suffering of the population and the technical rigor in analyzing the problem of hunger helped his work to cross the walls of academia and be celebrated in different languages.

She is, for example, in the documentary “Josué de Castro, Cidadão do Mundo” (Silvio Tendler, 1994), in the series of reports made by journalist Marcelo Canellas for Jornal Nacional, on TV Globo, in 2001, and in the song “Da Mud to Chaos”, by Chico Science and Nação Zumbi.

I didn’t learn about Josué de Castro at school, it’s a shame. But I got to know about it when we did the mangrove movement. I saw how important the figure of Castro was. ‘Josué, I’ve never seen such disgrace, the more misery there is, the more vulture threatens'”

In 2014, the country would leave the UN Hunger Map, following food and nutritional security strategies applied since redemocratization and reinforced since the beginning of the 2000s.

This scenario begins to change with the spiral of economic crises and high inflation, worsening in the following years, when experts point to a dismantling of food security policies aggravated by the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

In 2022, the Second National Survey on Food Insecurity in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic pointed out that 33.1 million people were not guaranteed what to eat.

Was [Castro] who said that there was hunger in Brazil and gave hunger a political and scientific status, because Brazil has this characteristic of hiding its major problems. Josué came and said that this was an issue and that it had to be confronted

The arguments raised by him in the 20th century, when he established that the issue of hunger is political, make even more sense in Brazil today, recalled former minister Tereza Campello, in a presentation celebrating the relaunch of “Geografia da Fome”.

Campello and researcher Ana Paula Bortoletto are the organizers of “From Hunger to Hunger”, the result of a seminar held in 2021 by the Josué de Castro Chair of Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems, from the Faculty of Public Health at USP.

The texts are authored by names such as José Graziano da Silva, who was director-general of FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), and Carlos Monteiro, specialist in nutrition and food.

The authors point out that hunger is the result of a choice of an exclusionary model. In the same way that Castro understood that hunger did not result from drought or poor people’s habits, they argue that using the new coronavirus pandemic to justify the lack of access to food reinforces the policy of exclusion.

The new book rescues the importance of social movements in the fight against hunger, pointing out that the lack of basics for survival goes beyond physical geography and is marked by racial signs.

The work also covers the evolution of the population’s dietary patterns – and how the exaggerated consumption of ultra-processed foods harms health and the environment.

She also points out examples of collective mobilization to combat hunger, such as solidarity kitchens, and focuses on the new geography of food production in Brazil: the dilemma of industrialization, or Josué de Castro’s “bread or steel”, now it is transformed into “bread or a commodity”, as it pits a country that is a champion of grain exports against one that has failed to feed its people.

Thus, although the problem portrayed by Josué de Castro is already known, it is repeated in a different context, in which record harvests contrast with the lack of access to food.

“If we placed the current Brazilian soybean crops side by side, they would occupy an area equivalent to more than three times the territory of Portugal (…) In the opposite direction, however, the basic foods of Brazilian culture —rice and beans— had reduction of their harvest areas”, points out an excerpt.

In addition to the printed volume, published by Editora Elefante, a digital version can be downloaded for free on the project’s website.

In “Da Fome à Fome”, the authors highlight that the challenge for Brazil to feed its population becomes even more complex than in Castro’s times, at a time of deindustrialization, advance of commodities in the export basket and environmental crisis. This is a challenge for the new government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and which the president promised to face.

It looks like a caterpillar eating us from the inside. Sometimes I even spend hours in front of a supermarket to get food or looking for a donation queue. When you have it, the food hits an empty stomach and you can’t even taste it, it just hurts

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