LATIN AMERICA:
Cozinha Brasil Goes Regional
Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO,  (IPS) - A successful Brazilian programme aimed at fighting hunger and reducing waste of food will be expanded throughout Latin America, by means of an agreement with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Through the programme known as Cozinha Brasil "we have helped reduce the costs of food, while maintaining flavour and nutritional levels, and preventing waste," Jair Antonio Meneguelli, president of Social Services for Industry (SESI), told IPS.

SESI, a national agency created in Brazil 60 years ago to raise the standard of living of workers and their families, is responsible for the programme and signed the agreement with the regional office of FAO in the Chilean capital on Friday to replicate it around the region.

SESI is state-mandated but privately controlled by the business community. It is funded by contributions from companies and workers, whose amount is set by law, and its leaders are selected in negotiations in which the government also has a voice.

Surveys cited by SESI indicate that around 30 percent of the bulk of all food that is purchased in Brazil goes to waste -- mainly the peels, stems, leaves or seeds of vegetables and fruit.

The reasons for this are that people are unfamiliar with the nutritional value of these parts of produce, do not know how to cook them, or do not even see them as food.

The Cozinha Brasil Programme was launched in 1999 by the SESI office in Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city, under the name "Eat Well for One Real" (the local currency, now equivalent to 46 cents of a dollar). The aim was to educate workers and their families on how to make the best possible use of available foodstuffs.

In 2000, the programme began to offer free courses on food education as well as courses to train community facilitators, in fixed and mobile "cooking schools" and restaurant schools.

The food education courses are geared towards local residents, especially people in low-income areas and beneficiaries of the "Fome Zero" (Zero Hunger) Programme, one of the most ambitious social initiatives of the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which got underway as soon as the president, a former trade unionist, took office on Jan. 1, 2003.

The food education courses are taught by the community facilitators trained by the Cozinha Brasil programme.

The facilitators tend to be cooks, bakers or people responsible for meals in institutions like retirement homes, schools, day care centres and soup kitchens.

In 2005, the programme became a nationwide initiative thanks to an agreement signed by the SESI National Council and the Ministry of Social Development and the Fight Against Hunger, and its name was changed to Cozinha Brasil.

The stated aim of the project is "to promote food education actions with a view to improving the health and quality of life of local communities, especially in lower-income areasà.while aiming at the production of low-cost food with a high nutritional value."

The programme also respects regional and cultural differences, while encouraging people to take advantage of locally available foods and helping to generate sources of family income.

Due to the success of the initiative, the FAO regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean decided to sign a "memorandum of understanding" with SESI to expand the programme to the rest of the region.

"We want to involve private initiative in programmes that fight hunger," FAO regional representative José Graziano Da Silva told IPS. "FAO is making an effort to include organised civil society as a whole, and especially business," because "it is not possible to eradicate hunger solely with government support."

"It is a challenge for society at large," he argued.

In the agreement signed Friday in Santiago, SESI committed itself to disseminating, along with FAO, information on the programme, and to train teams sent from different countries to Brazil. In addition, it will help orient the various stages of organisation of the regionwide effort and will offer technical support to the governments implementing the project.

FAO, meanwhile, will provide SESI with advice on technology transfer, help disseminate information on typical recipes used in each area, and promote the participation of civil society in the countries taking part in the programme.

Meneguelli said the programme will soon begin to operate in Uruguay, a small country between Brazil and Argentina.

"We received a call from the Montevideo city government and a local non-governmental organisation. They invited us to come, we presented the programme, and a team of nutritionists has already been trained to implement the programme there," under the name Cocina Uruguay, he told IPS.

SESI was also contacted by a non-governmental organisation in the United States, to share experiences.

"We are interested in seeing the programme expand around the world," said Meneguelli, who clarified that Cozinha Brasil has no end-date, because it is "an initiative of the business community in Brazil, which should continue regardless of which party is in power."

Chilean organisations like the governmental National Board of Childcare Centres (JINJI), the Chilean Nutrition Association, and the Association of Chilean Food Companies were invited to attend the signing of the memorandum of understanding between FAO and SESI, and expressed strong interest in replicating the initiative in Chile.

Graziano Da Silva told IPS that in the next few days, he would meet with the heads of the Chilean Nutrition Association and the Association of Chilean Food Companies to study how business executives can take part in a local version of the programme.

By August, Cozinha Brasil had trained 220,000 facilitators, 93 percent of whom are women. Of that total, nearly 33 percent had no income, 28 percent earned the minimum wage, and 22 percent earned up to three times the minimum wage.

By April 2007, SESI hopes to have 271,000 students attending 9,291 courses on food education or facilitator training courses. To reach that goal, they plan to install 30 more "cooking schools", to bring the total to 57.

Each mobile unit used by Cozinha Brasil, which have a cost of 80,000 to 100,000 dollars, is staffed by a team of three nutritionists and two cooks, and operates in three shifts.

The mobile kitchens were purchased by SESI in conjunction with private companies.

According to the latest data from FAO, 53 million people -- 10 percent of the population -- in Latin America are malnourished. But among children, the proportion rises to 20 percent.

The governments of Brazil and Guatemala launched the Hunger-Free Latin America by 2020 initiative during the Latin American conference on hunger in September 2005 in Guatemala.