Beginning to end hunger: Food and the environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and beyond

Beginning to End Hunger presents the story of Belo Horizonte, a city of 2.5 million people in Brazil and home to one of the world’s most successful urban food security programs. Since its creation under a Workers’ Party administration in 1993, the city’s Municipal Secretariat for Food Security has overseen a dramatic decline in malnutrition. The Secretariat’s innovations served as an inspiration for Brazil’s renowned national “Zero Hunger” program a decade later. But why have Belo Horizonte’s urban food policies been so successful? And how was this dramatic advance in food security policy achieved? The Municipal Secretariat’s work with local constituencies across the socio-political spectrum and with small family farmers beyond the city limits offers a glimpse at how food security, rural livelihoods, and healthy ecosystems can be supported together in other places around the world. While inevitably imperfect, Belo’s efforts offer a vision of the path away from food systems presently characterized by dysfunction, unsustainability, and prevalent hunger.