MONTH INTERVIEW- TEREZA CAMPELLO – Wherever possible, a Brazilian will always want to cook rice and beans

According to Tereza Campello, Brazil is resisting, but an over-exposure to advertising and increased access to ultra-processed products have negatively impacted upon the country’s nutritional intake

We’ve made it to December. To conclude a difficult year thwart by the pandemic and a financial crisis, our theme for the Escolhas monthly interview is food security and our interviewee is Tereza Campello – former Minister for Social Development and the Fight Against Hunger (2011 – 2016. An economist specializing in this issue, Campello is an associate researcher at the University of Nottingham (UK), and part of the University of São Paulo’s Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health (NUPENS/USP).

During the first part of our conversation, Campello discusses the adverse effects of the pandemic on hunger and food availability, as well as what measures the government can or should take to alleviate the crisis and protect the population from the COVID-19 price hike. According to Campello, the country was properly warned about how the coronavirus pandemic could impact domestic food availability in early 2020. However, in deciding to let the market self-regulate, the government’s risk taking went on to culminate in the recent price surge for rice and other food items.

“While some countries protected their citizens, Brazil took advantage of the situation by exporting its rice rather than keeping it in the country. The price of rice increased because the real [local currency] lost value against the dollar, and because Brazil was not prepared to act decisively by regulating the market,” stated the former minister.

In her interview, Campello also addresses the importance of ensuring quality food that is line with Brazil’s traditional cuisine (to the detriment of ultra-processed food), and especially for the country’s most disadvantaged. We spoke about sustainability in the context of tax reform and shed light on the need to increase Brazil’s academic production on the subject of food, as well as encouraging sustainable agricultural production in cities and improving the population’s eating habits.

See the full interview below:

 

Escolhas – About three years ago, you launched the book Faces da Desigualdade no Brasil [The Faces of Inequality in Brazil], in which you show how several areas are advancing in the fight to reduce inequality in the country. Today, the Gini index, which in 2015 was at 0.494, is now at 0.509, showing an increase in inequality. The social isolation measures introduced to combat the coronavirus pandemic have also increased, highlighting the country’s structural inequality and in particular the spike in unemployment and hunger. In this context, what currently characterizes the country’s most vulnerable population? What are the greatest current challenges for policymaking to combat inequality?

Tereza Campello – Today there is a consensus among economists, and naturally among social science researchers, that inequality is not only wealth-based: we must analyze the various “unprotections” and “non-accesses” present in the different sectors of society, and consequently look at inequalities as a matrix. For instance, we must look at inequalities between black people and white people, at what affects different ages – for example, children in Brazil are much worse off than the elderly –, or from the point of view of access to sanitation. In general, those who are poor in terms of income are also poor in terms of other things too: they are poor in water, poor in quality food, poor in education, poor in health. So, my book Faces da Desigualdade no Brasil was designed to address this issue, but from the perspective of the economically disadvantaged. In Brazil, it has become very common to discuss inequality comparing the richest 1% to the rest of the population. So, you say “ah, Brazil is very unequal, the richest 1% concentrates so much of the income, while the rest of the population has less than half of it” – but the rest of the population is also very unequal. Moreover, normally when a public policy manages to reach the economically disadvantaged population, it does not translate directly into income. Take the example of cisterns, which I consider an exceptional example because it is a public policy that positively impacted a clearly excluded sector of society, which is Brazil’s northeastern population. The people that live in the Northeast of the country are much poorer than the rest of Brazil; the rural northeastern population is much poorer than the rest of Brazil’s rural population and even poorer still than its urban population, so it is clearly a part of our society that is violently affected by income inequality and a number of other inequalities. When a family gets a cistern, they get access to water and not only their personal lives and hygiene improve, but they also get better access to income, since with this cistern they can often produce more: they have water for the chickens, which is something that was previously lacking. It is not only water for drinking and comfort. A cistern achieves this sustainably because it does not waste energy, it collects rainwater and does not emit carbon. It is a win-win situation that is not calculated in the GDP, it is not calculated by the IBGE [the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics], it is not calculated in terms of income, it is not calculated for anything. This family has had a super important reduction in inequality, and yet this is not present in the statistics. We developed this book precisely to try and get a holistic view of the inequality affecting the low-income population, and particularly to take into account these dimensions of education, health, access to consumer goods, access to water and sanitation, which are also issues of environmental impact and sustainability. Here, the word sustainability means: the cistern lasts 30 years (I am taking the cistern as an example because I think it’s a milestone in the public policy agenda when it comes to overcoming inequalities). And when we look at the most recent period, it is not only poverty that has increased. The Gini shows the increase of poverty and the increase of inequality. Poverty has increased dramatically in Brazil during this period. In the case of extreme poverty, we can go all the way back to 2006 (it has been a 13-year effort to reduce poverty, and yet we’ve quickly regressed to the numbers from the beginning of the century), but inequalities increase in a multidimensional way. For example, cisterns have stopped being made in Brazil, just as various other initiatives have stopped.

 

Escolhas – You participated in the creation of the Bolsa Familia [federal government social welfare program], which is now a world reference in income transfer policy and the fight against hunger. With the pandemic, one proposed solution to assist the most vulnerable population was emergency aid, guaranteeing the population’s income at the time of crisis. What does this experience teach us or make us reflect on regarding social assistance programs? What are the challenges for ensuring their expansion in times of crisis like these?

Tereza Campello – This is a very interesting question because it allows us to compare situations. One thing is to have a continuous policy in place and another thing is to be prepared, as a State, to act in emergency situations. An easier reference could be this: it is one thing to have an agricultural policy, be it for development or for regulation (stock or otherwise). It is another thing, however, to have a completely atypical situation, such as an unexpected drought or frost that impacts all production. In this case, you have to be prepared with an insurance policy, not a traditional development policy. In a way, the emergency aid was like a discontinued income insurance policy because the situation of the pandemic is completely atypical. We had an abrupt interruption of the economy – an interruption of the entire world economy, not just in Brazil – and this interruption generated widespread crises, interrupting both the production chains and the income of a huge part of the population, as businesses closed and economic activities were disrupted, including for those employed informally. So, this is an atypical situation in which the Brazilian State was able to react somewhat better because of the pre-existing Bolsa Família and Cadastro Único [Single Registry]. Those who were already recipients of the Bolsa Família or registered in the Cadastro Único were able to receive emergency assistance immediately. For those who were not, it ended up taking three, four months, and thus they received it very late. And this was a survival resource for the population that was not considered poor, that were not in a situation of structural poverty, but rather had fallen into poverty or income vulnerability due to this abrupt interruption. So, there are two very interesting things to discuss: in the case of Brazil, the coronavirus, COVID-19, hit us at a dramatic moment. It would have been a seriously drastic situation at any moment in our history, but, for example, in 2014, it could have been a different type of situation because unemployment was at 6% and the vast majority of the population was in formal employment, and thus with proper social benefits. From 2015 onwards, unemployment started to rise. When COVID hit Brazil, we already had 12% unemployment. It is not that unemployment didn’t exist and the situation got worse just because of COVID-19. No. Unemployment was already very high, so a part of the population was already vulnerable from the point of view of the labor market and income conditions. Second: the disorganization of the labor market threw a large part of the population into informality, which we call “pejotização” [term derived from CNPJ – the acronym for the national identification number issued to Brazilian companies –, implying that because a person is hired as a company rather than as an individual, they won’t receive their due social benefits] or the “uberization” of workers on internet platforms. So, we gave up on formal employment and began to weaken the labor market, including the destruction of the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT). So, we’re talking about people who thanks to COVID-19 ended up falling into a situation of complete unprotection, without unemployment insurance and without the state even being able to generate protective situations, such as those in England, Germany and elsewhere. As a result, emergency aid turned out to be a quick way to guarantee the survival of the population and more: to guarantee that, albeit only slightly, the economy did not stop because these people continued to buy, they continued to feed themselves. This “income mattress” kept the economy afloat so that people could continue to procure the basics. Some recent studies have shown that the emergency aid has ensured, for example, that the GDP fell by only half of what it would have done otherwise. But to return to the original question, the Bolsa Familia was not created to respond to dramatic situations such as COVID-19. No country in the world was prepared. No country in the world had a cash transfer policy like the Bolsa Familia in place that could respond to a crisis of such proportions. They all had to take emergency measures. That is why the aid given by the Brazilian government was an emergency aid. What the Bolsa Familia involves – and this is why it is the world’s largest and most efficient cash transfer program – is not a bank card with an application. The Bolsa Familia is a gateway to the state. When a person seeks out the Bolsa Família, they are received by the State via a public servant, a social worker, who gets to know their needs. Most likely, not only is the person poor in income, but they are often subject to some kind of violence, to a lack of protection. So, the Bolsa Familia is a gateway to a safety net, properly informed by the knowledge of where the family lives, what protections it receives, which members of the family have received a proper education, which members of the family are employed, if the family is indigenous, what languages the family members speak. All this is stored in the Cadastro Único, that’s why it is so efficient.

 

Escolhas – The coronavirus pandemic has also impacted food production and distribution processes and revealed the weaknesses of our food system, such as increased hunger, environmental impacts, food prices, interruptions in supply, and even waste. We have witnessed the rise in the price of commodities on Brazilian plates, such as rice. What could the country have done to prevent this from happening? How can policies pertaining to food supply and nutritional security mitigate impacts such as those brought about by the pandemic, considering that the country is a major agricultural producer, and taking into account the size of its domestic market?

Brazil has given up defending the public interest. The following discourse reigns in the country today: “it is the free market… we cannot interfere”, as if the market could regulate itself. And this coronavirus tragedy brings forth some very important reflections. Take rice as an example: in March, I participated in various activities coordinated by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), which since January or February has been calling on member states to discuss the potential impacts of COVID. At these meetings that the FAO coordinated, we saw that some countries that are major consumers and that are also major rice producers immediately took measures to protect the internal market. Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, India or China, which are major consumers of rice like Brazil, took measures to protect their people and their food security. This was in January, February and March. And what has Brazil done? Nothing, and not because it did not know there would be problems in the international rice market. Brazil knew and was warned by the United Nations that this was going to happen. Why was nothing done then? Brazil made a choice because it was in the interests of the major Brazilian exporters to export at a favorable price rather than protect its citizens. For the Brazilian people, rice is fundamental. Rice represents around 15% of the energy on a typical Brazilian plate, and that is not all. Rice has another important role because it organizes the dish. When you put rice on your plate, it is as if it were calling beans, choko, zucchini, lettuce, tomato – or for those who can afford it – a piece of meat or an egg. The rice calls other things. So, the government’s response of: “Then eat noodles” is criminal. Wheat is not of our culture and when you put noodles on a plate, for the poor it calls a sausage, it won’t call beans and zucchini. It disorganizes our dish, our culture, our tradition. What the government has done is criminal from a cultural point of view. It will accelerate the food transition in Brazil, which is one of the countries that are best resisting the food transition. In England, for example, the vast majority of the products on the population’s plate come from the supermarket and are ultra-processed. It is not only because it has undergone a process of industrialization, it is because it is no longer food, it is something else. In Brazil, however, wherever possible, the Brazilian will want to cook rice and beans, or cook up a fish. We still resist, but the government is betting on accelerating this process as it disorganizes us. The price of rice has not risen because the people have eaten more rice thanks to receiving the emergency aid, as the government wants to imply. The price of rice has risen because rice became less available on the international market, when some countries protected their people and Brazil took advantage by exporting its rice instead of keeping it inside the country. The price of rice increased because our national currency, the real, lost value against the dollar and because Brazil was not prepared to act by regulating the market. The government has put an end to the stock policy, the food procurement program, and is preparing to sell the warehouses in Brazil, which allow us to stock beans, rice, corn – the essentials. For example, it was essential to have a stock of corn when we had a drought in the Northeast, because it is the best food for chicken and small animals. So, Brazil is essentially giving up its role as a regulator and thereby subjecting the country and its population to the risk of gigantic food insecurity.

 

Escolhas – Today Brazilians are not only consuming less fresh produce and more ultra-processed products but are also eating more outside the home. Obesity is already a serious public health problem, as is the increase in serious diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. Looking now at the consumption sphere, what can be devised in terms of public policies to change the habits of the population? What has already been done and what still needs to be done in this regard?

Tereza Campello – For all issues involving hunger, poverty, obesity… we cannot put faith in a silver bullet, a magic solution. “Let’s do this or that, which is going to solve all our problems” – it won’t. We must always think of the ensemble of public policies that will enable us to overcome dramatic phenomena such as hunger without falling into obesity, and at the same time, will ensure food security, preserve our cuisine, our food culture, and so on. Then there are people who say: “Look at the masses: they make a little money and just end up buying crap”. When we look at the scenario in Brazil, it is funny because the people who already had an income started the food transition long before those who didn’t. So, when you take the middle class and the upper middle class, they had already begun a food transition eating more processed and ultra-processed food, although they made enough income to buy organic produce. By gaining access to income, the poor in Brazil are being massacred by the same evils that have massacred middle-class children, which is over-exposure to advertising, over-exposure to unsuitable products, and ease of access to equally unsuitable products. Today there is poverty, malnutrition, and obesity, and obesity was already affecting middle-income and high-income sectors. So, I will cite a number of policies that need to be strengthened to avoid this. I think that one of them – and in this Brazil is exemplary – are school food programs, which center around school meals. We have achieved two things in Brazil: the national school food program in Brazil is an old program, which has existed since the 1940s, if I am not mistaken, but which for a long time provided children in the public education network with a snack that was largely inadequate. It was a stuffed biscuit, an artificial juice or an ultra-processed little porridge with artificial coloring and artificial strawberry flavor. The child ate that horrible, extremely sweet goop which filled his belly, but caused various damages: he lost the habit of eating, started to like that sweet taste, became addicted to sugar and thus lost his original appetite. When in 2009 we strengthened the National School Food Program, which we call the PNAE, we established that for school meals, at least 30% of the Federal Government’s money should be used to buy locally, from family farmers, and primarily quotas of vegetables, fruits, or minimally processed products such as rice, beans, etc. This created a fantastic win-win situation that strengthened the local economy with these short circuits, not only reducing transport needs, but also reducing emissions. When we eat locally, the tendency is that we buy fresher products and with that, the child in school stops eating super chemical products that are full of sugar and additives, and instead starts eating a plate of rice with beans, with zucchini, with choka, with okra, with things that get them used to having healthy food, as well as maintaining their traditional, local cuisine. At school, a child in the northern state of Pará eats açaí berry products, fish, Brazil nuts, which are the things the PNAE began to buy. This has the added benefit of valuing biodiversity. The school meal program is perhaps the best example because it is multidimensional and multi-beneficial: it improves the family’s income, since with the child eating at school, it is one less meal at home; it generates indirect income, healthy diets, short circuits, it strengthens the income of family farming. This ended up happening with credit policies for family farming, policies aimed at technical assistance, the national policy to strengthen agroecological production. The big problem is that all these policies have been dismantled. So, while poverty is increasing in Brazil – as I was saying in response to your first question –, other policies have ensured that the process of inclusion and improvement of quality of life is being dismantled.

 

Escolhas – Recently, Escolhas launched a study on the potential for agricultural production in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, which, surprisingly, would be enough to supply its entire population with locally produced vegetables. Do you agree that large urban centers play a role in shaping food production and distribution methods? Not only in Brazil but worldwide?

I had the opportunity to take a look at the Summary and I was surprised by the quantity, richness and diversity identified in the area surrounding São Paulo – and look, I know a fair amount on the subject, I even wrote a policy paper on solutions for medium and large cities. So, more than speak specifically about São Paulo or the study itself, what it made clear for me is how all cities should do something similar to what you did. Across Brazil, mayors have been taking office after the recent regional elections. The Federal Government has been dismantling the policies of healthy food and nutritional security, and we have a lot of room for local governments – and especially incoming mayors – to act. The study that Escolhas conducted shows that we probably have unknown realities like this in all our cities: a lot of possible productive space and many farmers and urban areas producing fresh, healthy food. This study reveals how tragic this is because it prevents us from strategic planning. By having information, the public sector can make choices. It can say “let’s try and see if that particular choice can lead to these policies being properly valued, can lead to these actions evolving (which often happened voluntarily, not in an intentional way)”, because depending on the situation, many of these businesses are fragile and they can go under. If someone has a small yard producing fruit and vegetables, depending on what happens, if people stop buying them, they end up losing out. The production disappears and that person becomes a seamstress or goes to work in another industry. So, what can the State – speaking in terms of public authority – do to stimulate these discoveries, this proof that you have revealed in your study, so that the population can access this wealth, this diversity that cities are capable of producing? I was really very happy with the results. We have a certain intuition that it is possible, but it is different to see that it is already happening, that it is right there in front of us. And what if you combine it with other policies? I remember that during the Haddad administration [Fernando Haddad, former mayor of São Paulo, 2013-2017], the government made a decision to procure only organic rice for school meals. Organic rice is not produced here in the Green Belt but imagine having the rest of the food produced here, locally, green, fresh, together with organic rice. What can eating such healthy food bring to poor children in terms of transformation? I lived in England for the past two years. My daughter didn’t eat at school because the canteen there serves hot dogs, pizza, macaroni – these are the options. She couldn’t eat because it was always dripping with oil, and so she took lunchboxes from home filled with quinoa and fish, salmon, wholewheat sandwiches. So, imagine a child in poor Brazil eating organic rice, vegetables, fresh salad, a luxury – and a cheap luxury.

 

Escolhas – We are in the midst of a tax reform discussion that can have significant impacts on income, as well as on the prices of consumer goods. How do you see civil society proposals – such as campaigns for sustainable and healthy tax reform – for taxing ultra-processed food or food from production processes that degrade the environment? What is the potential for such measures to change the population’s consumption habits? Are there risks?

As I said, we cannot find a single silver bullet here. I don’t think that the tax issue alone will solve things, unless you tax processed food to the point of preventing its commercialization. I will take the issue of smoking in Brazil. Brazil has an experience with smoking, an anti-smoking policy that is a beautiful example. I don’t have the precise numbers off the top of my head, but we had a large percentage of the Brazilian adult population that were smokers, and this was reduced over 20 years to levels never imagined before. With what? A set of policies: the very strong tax incentive, together with a ban on advertising. Before, when I was young and even a smoker, the image of smoking was allied to the image that it was beautiful to smoke: athletes were pictured smoking – riding and smoking, sailing on a yacht and smoking, and then that was eliminated. You no longer have cigarette advertising. In fact, it’s anti-propaganda. You take a packet of cigarettes and you have a photo of a person on it with their rotten viscera exposed. This could be a joint effort – allying antipropaganda to a price increase. I think it is very important that the tax reform agenda be incorporated into an agenda reorienting the issue of sustainability. So, aligning the issue of valuing fresh, minimally processed food with sustainability and other elements. Who is food produced by? If it is produced on a smaller scale, if it is produced in the forest, all this has to be considered. Therefore, it is ideal if we can get people to value the origin of these products, value that they are products of socio-biodiversity, value that they are a part of our national culture, value our intangible, cultural, food heritage. All this should be combined with promoting the issue of overtaxing ultra-processed products that use pesticides and agrochemicals, which are bad for both humans and the environment. I think it is fundamental that Escolhas is raising this issue because we cannot think about taxes in Brazil by focusing solely on tax collection. All over the world, the tax issue has now become a catalyst for new models. Now this cannot come alone, it has to be aligned with very powerful regulatory measures on the part of the State. For example, not encouraging the purchase of ultra-processed products, as can often be the case. Our public hospitals, for example: you go to the public hospital and what do they give you? Jelly and those little juice boxes. The person is sick, recuperating and what do they eat? Jelly, which is pumped full of food additives and that ultra-processed juice, which doesn’t even smell like fresh fruit. So why are we buying junk? Why aren’t we serving a little apple compote? There are a number of things that should be introduced in parallel, and which would certainly have a great impact, as we were able to achieve with smoking. And there are people who say: “but it’s a cultural issue, it’s very strongly ingrained this desire to eat sandwiches, and hamburgers”. How so? Twenty years ago, we didn’t even have them. We have entered a transition where a child’s moment of joy is to go to McDonald’s instead of eating rice pudding or carrot cake, as it used to be. And why can’t we get that back? This is not a matter of free choice; it is allowing the population to be captured by this harmful industry that encourages them to eat badly in order for it to make money.

 

Escolhas – You are now an associate researcher at the University of Nottingham, as well as at the Nucleus of Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health (NUPENS/USP). How important is research on food systems in Brazil and around the world? What data still needs to be generated and what approaches are still needed?

It is essential to invest in research in this area. Brazil has a huge amount of healthy and sustainable experiences, in fact, we have wonderful things happening all over the world. There are people producing with Creole seeds, people managing to improve seeds without making genetic changes, family farmers discovering sustainable ways to produce in semi-arid climates, in the Cerrado [Brazilian tropical savanna], in the forest, with very high productivity rates and with extremely positive environmental impacts. None of this is being properly researched or published. So, what happens: today you have very little academic research produced on the issue, and what exists is mostly in English. There are many examples proving the economic sustainability and value of recognizing the worth of socio-biodiversity production chains in Brazil. We have production chains that could better optimize their high added value, that have proven impacts in terms of forest preservation, that improve the income of economically disadvantaged, highly vulnerable populations, and all this without damaging the rich diversity of forests, of the environment and the biomes of Brazil. This proves that a win-win situation where economically viable and environmentally sustainable systems have been created and should be properly documented and published. It can be proven, for example, that it is more efficient and more profitable to put a flock of cattle in the forest rather than cut it down, more efficient than using a plantation model for grain production in the Cerrado – which creates food monotony that is not only expensive, but inefficient and bad for our health. We do not have any of this properly documented or published in an academic context. Material on the urban voids, the food deserts or the study that Escolhas have done, for example – it would be great to publish a policy paper showing how worthwhile it is for cities to produce. This is seemingly invisible in the eyes of the public sector. So, a lot of research still needs to be done. For example, we created 1.2 million cisterns in Brazil and there is not a single international research paper in English to report on the efficiency of these cisterns, on how they bring social justice and their positive impact from an environmental and public health perspective. It just doesn’t exist. So, we have that challenge. We still often segregate scientific knowledge and popular knowledge. Brazil has shown that there is valuable popular knowledge, and that the issue is not which is better or worse, which is more efficient, which is more correct. There is popular knowledge that teaches a lot to those in academic positions – we have a lot to learn from this popular knowledge, this science produced by the people, but which has not yet been decoded and channeled into academic papers. This is an enormous challenge, a very valuable one, and I think that all of us in the academic sector, you guys there at the Instituto Escolhas, and in the third sector as a whole, have a lot to offer.