Smallholder Farmers’ Gross Income Surges 24% with Food Acquisition Program- University of São Paulo Study
According to the federal government, the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), created by art. 19 of Law No. 10.696, of July 2, 2003, has two basic purposes: to promote access to food and to encourage family farming. The program was created as part of the Zero Hunger project and operates by purchasing food produced by family farming, with no bidding process, and allocating it to people in situations of food insecurity and to those served by the social welfare network, through public food and nutritional security equipment and by the public and philanthropic education network. The program operates through six modalities: Purchase with Simultaneous Donation, Direct Purchase, Support for Stock Formation, Incentive for Milk Production and Consumption, Institutional Purchase and Seed Acquisition. The main one is Purchase with Simultaneous Donation, when the program purchases food produced by family farmers and donates it to social welfare entities.
The measure benefits both food suppliers and consumers. Agrarian reform settlers, extractivists, artisanal fishermen, indigenous people, quilombola communities and other traditional peoples have their production connected to the purchasing demand, which in this case is made up of people in situations of food insecurity, food stocks and public schools.
The operators include the National Supply Company (Conab), the states, the Federal District and the municipalities. The resources for the PAA come from different sources, depending on the modality being operated. The main funder is the Ministry of Citizenship. In the case of the stock formation modality, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (Mapa) is responsible for the funds. In institutional purchases, the public entity of the direct or indirect administration interested in the purchase bears the costs.
Impacts on the economy
Studies by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea) collected data from the implementation of the program until 2019 to analyze the impacts of the program on the economy and food security of the beneficiary population. According to the research, access to the program increased the average annual gross income of family farmers by 24% between 2009 and 2017. The impact on the poorest 10% was 45%. For Ana Bertolini, a researcher at the Global Health and Sustainability Program at the USP School of Public Health, the good numbers presented are the result of the elimination of bureaucracy. “An important factor that must be taken into consideration is the elimination of the need for bidding to access food. The program offers a quick and easier process to buy directly from these farmers. There are many bureaucratic obstacles to accessing public policies, these farmers are usually not organized into entities, which makes access to credit lines and similar policies even more difficult. With the PAA, this connection between the government and farmers is greatly facilitated”, she explains.
The researchers also analyzed the impact of the PAA on the growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of municipalities that accessed the program. The results showed that, on average, there was a higher percentage of GDP growth in municipalities that accessed the program compared to those that did not. The study highlights that family farming is the basis for the local economy of 90% of municipalities with up to 20 thousand inhabitants, and is responsible for the income of 40% of the economically active population in the country. In 2012, the year in which more resources were allocated to the policy, there was a 1.88% increase in the percentage of GDP growth in the benefited municipalities.
Ana Bertolini explains that, in addition to its role in promoting family farming and food security, the program has an important impact on containing national crises. “In this context of crises that we are experiencing, it is very important to work with food stocks. We have seen the COVID-19 pandemic and now climate issues affecting harvests, such as the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul. In this sense, the PAA is a very important public policy for us to think about in times of impact from these crises, because one of the ways to operationalize this public policy is precisely by supplying public stocks. So it is important that we have a stock of healthy and sustainable food so that we can make donations and contribute to this needy population, in addition to being able to mitigate economic effects during these more difficult times”, she concludes.