Acesso à alimentação adequada e saudável no Brasil

Abstract

Long known to the Brazilian population, food insecurity at its different levels is once again plaguing society after years of improvements in policies for access to adequate and healthy food. In mid-2013, but especially after 2019, when a new federal government that excludes hunger from its political agenda takes power, Food Insecurity levels began to grow again across the country. Through a historical recap that covers until the period of the health crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, this academic work will guide us through the actions of international and national bodies and entities, as well as the implementation of public policies that aim to ensure decent nutrition for the Brazilian population, and often fail. Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit Brazil in March 2020, the human right to adequate food becomes increasingly difficult to achieve, considering the social and health crises experienced at the time. Considering the results presented by the research “Inquérito Nacional sobre Insegurança Alimentar no Contexto da Pandemia da Covid-19 no Brasil” published by Rede PENSSAN in 2021, and the “Efeitos da pandemia na alimentação e na situação da segurança alimentar no Brasil” published by the group of Food for Justice research, from Freie Universität Berlin, in partnership with the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the University of Brasília, in 2021, we will analyze the impacts of political decisions taken before and during the pandemic period – we will use the concepts of biopower and biopolitics to point out how political desire and action is crucial to managing the lives of the population, and the way in which failure can also be a choice and its reasons – to understand and trace how power over life is exercised through by means other than making someone die, treated here as political abandonment, in order to understand which mechanisms are responsible for the exercise of Necropolitics. Finally, the work intends to analyze the reality of the Human Right to Adequate Food in Brazil during the period related to the COVID-19 pandemic and present the impact of political action on this issue, concluding that, in some moments, the emptying of public policies and the 13 negligence in tackling problems of great social impact can come from a place of political control over the biological life of the population.