Abstract
In this analysis, we examine the contextualized repercussions of a food distribution program among people considered to be suffering from food and nutrition insecurity in Brazil. We concentrate our efforts on neighborhood centers in the city of Porto Alegre that benefitted from the national social policy, Fome Zero, between 2014 and 2015. In the first part of this article, we sketch a profile of the participants in each of two neighborhoods in order to demonstrate the extreme heterogeneity of the program’s beneficiaries. In a second moment, we extend our gaze to the program’s organizational dimensions in order to explore the way in which people – administrators as well as community leaders – react to the problematic situation, evident at the time, of scarce and irregular food delivery. At the beginning of our investigation, we used classical ethnographic techniques in the local communities. However, the program’s irregularity led us to include the analysis of administrative documents, interviews with administrators in the relevant sectors of municipal and state government, and observation in the collective political space where the community leaders brought their concerns on a biweekly basis: the Forum Fome Zero. We suggest that whereas quantitative methods may aptly describe the quantity and periodicity of food shipments, qualitative methods focused on microterritories and community leaders bring to light other forms of the program’s productivity in the arenas of political mobilization and social control.
Keywords:
public policy; food distribution; community organization; social control