Federal Government relaunches Food Purchase Program in Recife

By Rosa Sampaio, Sabiá Center journalist

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will be in Recife on the 22nd to announce the resumption of the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), the Women’s Productive and Economic Organization Program, and also to sign the decree reestablishing the National Council for Sustainable Rural Development – CONDRAF. The event will start at 3 pm, at the Geraldão Gymnasium, in the Imbiribeira neighborhood, in the capital of Pernambuco. After four years of scrapping these public policies and the emptying of CONDRAF, the farming families, organizations, and movements in the countryside continue full of hope, but also in struggle for popular mobilization in the countryside.

Created at the beginning of the first Lula administration, in 2003, PAA was instituted to encourage sustainable family agriculture by stimulating the consumption of the sector’s production, mainly through purchases made by public bodies. The practice also tends to contribute to the formation of public stocks, helping to avoid the skyrocketing prices of the main foodstuffs, as well as encouraging healthy eating habits.

According to information from the Ministry of Agrarian Development, the federal government will relaunch the PAA, with R$ 500 million for the whole country. The Program works through the direct purchase of food from family farms by the government and its distribution to people in a situation of food insecurity. For this, agreements are established between the government and municipalities, states, or civil society organizations that work with family agriculture. The family farmers sell their products to the government at prices compatible with the local market, and the government takes care of the distribution of the purchased food. Purchases can be made either individually or through cooperatives or producer associations.

The Rural Women’s Productive and Economic Organization Program was launched in 2008, with the objective of overcoming poverty and social inequalities in rural areas through a sustainable territorial development strategy. One of the main goals is to strengthen the productive organizations of rural women workers, encouraging the exchange of information, technical, cultural, organizational, management, and commercialization knowledge, valuing the principles of solidarity economy, in order to enable the access of women to public policies that support production and commercialization.

The National Council for Sustainable Rural Development – CONDRAF is a collegiate body and is part of the basic structure of the Ministry of Agrarian Development. It was instituted by Presidential Decree 4,854/03. The council aims to propose guidelines for the implementation and formulation of public policies on sustainable rural development, agrarian reform, and family agriculture. CONDRAF is made up of 38 members with the right to speak and vote: half of the seats are reserved for public authority representatives and the other half for civil society representatives. Besides this, there are the permanent guests, who have no voting rights, but can speak verbally – these are the heads of the secretariats of the Ministry of Agrarian Development and the president of INCRA – the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform.