Ive posted about the ABasteCer stalls before in my books time tag, WRT the book World Hunger. While ABasteCer is one of the many, many examples in the book but it has really stuck in my mind.
I think it's because it's a city-level initiative. There are a lot of examples of national policies that are good, but forcing national change can take a long, long time, and covers a very large area so doesn't provide the "immediate benefit in one's own life" that a highly local initiative can provide more easily. There are also a lot of examples of community groups, and while I love these, they can take a while to gain momentum and resources (financial, legal, otherwise) -- often either slower than one would like, or practicing illegality and therefore more precarious. Seeing something at the city-level is refreshing I think, showing an ability to leverage existing legal frameworks at the local level.
Though, I will note, ABasteCer is an initiative by the municipal food agency SMASAN, of the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil ... a metropolitan area which has a higher population than the entirety of the country I live in. so it's not easily comparable to municipalities here, which only 4 cities surpass 100,000 people.
This scale thing is why Im trying to find out more about ABasteCer, and comparable other initiatives. If you know more, / if you have interacted directly with ABC, I really wanna hear abt it!!
At its basics:
ABasteCer (ABC) is a municipal action taken by Belo Horizonte, one of many seeking to secure each citizen's right to food. I am struggling to find the specifics, only able to find stuff via the aforementioned book World Hunger, the World Future Council (which involves an author of World Hunger), and some pamphlets ... the Belo Horizonte govt website is denying me access to webpages, and I can't read portuguese.
afaik
ABC involves the city designating land specific for vendors -- farmers markets, maybe shops? -- in which a vendor is nominated to run that location. The vendor does not have to pay rent(?) in exchange for running the shop, but can be removed from their position as the vendor if the community / city feels they are not performing their duty.
In exchange for being given the shop to run, the vendor must sell certain food items at a below-market price. These food items are designated by the government and are not only staples but nutritionally important foods like fresh fruit and vegetables, heirloom grains, so on. The food items are purchased at above-market rates from local farmers who opt in to contributing to the ABC -- the farmers get paid more for their crops, and then those crops are sold on to the final consumer for less. The vendor, functionally, does not turn a profit on these crops at all, but not having to pay for premises offsets a lot of operating costs.
The vendor can then also sell the usual fare like other produce, meat, dairy, eggs, processed and ultraprocessed food, etc, for whatever price they want, which is how they turn a profit & maintain a livelihood.
This system does a lot of good in a few ways:
For the vendor -- job security, being able to turn a profit on selling stuff but not having to worry about operating costs as much, so rent hikes or similar aren't a risk. I would imagine that they'd also become an important community figure in some cases.
For the farmers -- small, local farmers often struggle to turn a profit, especially in the face of competition from unethical, unsustainable farming by international firms. In cases where they do sell in farmers markets (etc), their customer base is often reduced because of needing to sell at above-market prices due to costs like market stall permits. ABC structure allows them to sell at better prices to an even larger customer base.
For the community -- food is expensive & things like fresh fruit & vegetables, even more so. Even in populations where caloric intake is sufficient, nutritional intake is insufficient due to food lacking variety, & crop cultivars being bred for appearance and sweetness and transportability rather than nutrition ... e.g. USA, UK, etc, where poverty manifests in simultaneous obesity and malnutrition.
As per the World Future Council, there is integration with family & urban farmers, providing benefits to very small initiatives within the city as well as supporting rural peasants.
Poverty, unemployment (& related dissatisfaction with life), malnutrition, food insecurity, all tackled in one system of 20 programs (ONE of which is ABC) , those 20 programs being only 2% of the city's annual budget. So very, VERY hopeful for small-scale / local government level potential for incredible good, with a real-world example to point to. Rallying a group to pressure a municipal government is less daunting than a national one. I could imagine a similar model being workable w/o a government's support but governments do have a lot of people and connections that are useful if we can access them, even if the idea of "municipal government policy" isn't an ideal endpoint in one's mind.
so big wall of text. anyways calling for responses here.
Do you have access to more info about ABC specifically? I'd love to see it. Either your / your friends' experiences (etc), or if you have statistics & policy specifics from Belo Horizonte , I would be super duper excited to see :]
I don't speak portuguese, so english translations are ideal, I can read spanish which is somewhat mutually intelligible with written portuguese so non-english info is workable.
Do you have info about ABC-comparable programs elsewhere? Especially at different scales. I <3 looking at case studies and as mentioned the Belo Horizonte municipality has a higher population than the whole country I live in. So if I were to try and start something similar here, grassroots or otherwise, this factor should be considered.











