Description
Book SynopsisBeginning to End Hunger presents the story of Belo Horizonte, home to 2.5 million people and one of the world's most successful city food security programs. Since its Municipal Secretariat for Food Security was founded in 1993, malnutrition in Belo Horizonte has declined dramatically, allowing it to serve as an inspiration for Brazil's renowned Zero Hunger programs. The Municipal Secretariat's work with local small family farmers also offers a glimpse of how food security, rural livelihoods, and healthy ecosystems can be supported together. While inevitably imperfect, Belo Horizonte offers a vision of the path away from food system dysfunction, unsustainability, and hunger. The author's case study shows the vital importance of holistic approaches to food security, offers ideas on how to design successful policies to end hunger, and lays out strategies for how to make policy change happen. With these tools, we can take the next steps towards achieving similar reductions in hunger and food insecurity elsewhere in the developed and developing worlds.
Trade Review"It is tempting for socialists to argue simply that the problem is capitalism and that only a socialist, post-capitalist world can feed the world’s population healthily and sustainably. M. Jahi Chappell’s important study shows that this is wrong." * Climate and Capitalism *
"M. Jahi Chappell provides a necessary antidote to those who claim hunger cannot be alleviated." * The Journal of Peasant Studies *
"This is a very good book that I imagine will (and should) be adopted for use in a number of upper level undergraduate or graduate classes in the social sciences or interdisciplinary fields such as development studies, environmental studies, and food studies. I have just begun to use the text with my own students this semester and more than a few have remarked on how nice it is to have a relatively positive story as compared to the critiques and narratives of failure they often encounter in the social sciences." * American Association of Geographers Review of Books *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword by Frances Moore Lappé
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Food and Famine Futures, Past and Present
2. Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Beginning to End Hunger
3. Belo Horizonte: All Five A’s on the Horizon
4. Multiple Streams and the Evolution of the Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security
5. Farm, Farmer, and Forest: SMASAN and the Environment
6. Conclusions: Belo Horizonte and Beyond
Abbreviations
Notes
References
Index
