From Food Security to Farm to Formicidae: Belo Horizonte, Brazil's Secretaria Municipal de Abastecimento and Biodiversity in the Fragmented Atlantic Rainforest.

Abstract

Widespread food insecurity and rapid biodiversity loss are two of the most serious problems facing the world today. My work in this area focuses on two important questions: how can we address hunger in a world that produces enough food, but where poverty denies so many access to it? And, how can we accomplish this while conserving the environment upon which all organisms depend? In order to examine these questions, I conducted a case study of the connections between food security and conservation in the context of a large city (Belo Horizonte, 2.5 million residents) and its local food system, situated in the “mega-biodiverse” Atlantic Rainforest of southeastern Brazil. Belo Horizonte’s government made access to food a right of citizenship in 1993, creating a Secretariat of Supply (SMAB) to guarantee this right. SMAB has overseen dramatic reductions in infant malnutrition and mortality since its creation in 1993. SMAB’s programs also connects it to local, small family farmers, implicating the role local food may play in landscape biodiversity conservation. The objective of this work is to understand how SMAB formed, how it has achieved its present successes, and whether or not its connection with local farmers has generated differences in biodiversity in the agroecological landscape. Using ants as an indicator of biodiversity, my results suggest that SMAB has had a positive influence on the conservation of biodiversity both on the studied farm fields and within adjoining fragments of native rainforest. It appears that SMAB produces these effects by enhancing economic security for the partnering farmers (such security has been previously shown to affect the sustainability of farmer practices), and via the partner farmers’ regular contacts with agricultural extensionists as part of their participation in SMAB. My results may be the first comprehensive evaluation of a political ecological system starting from food policy and tracing its effects through to biodiversity. Only through such an integrated, holistic understanding of the articulation of human food systems and natural habitats can we conserve crucial and irreplaceable biodiversity, and provide human rights like food security in the “Developing World”, or indeed, in any of the world.