A city without hunger?

Today somebody sent me the link to an article called The City That Ended Hunger. The article tells the story of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. In 1993 the newly-elected mayor, Patrus Ananias, decided to make food a right of citizenship. His aim was to wipe out hunger in Belo Horizonte.

The new administration then set up a body to look at how to meet this right. The body included citizen representatives, as well as representatives from labour, business and the church. This agency went on to put in place a host of measures to ensure that no resident of the city would continue to go hungry.

They gave small-scale farmers spots to sell their produce, and set up ‘People’s Restaurants’ where people could get good, nutritious meals for next to nothing. They also helped set up community and school gardens and instituted nutrition classes.

The cost of all this was less than 2 percent of the city’s budget, and the results where phenomenal.  The measures helped 40% of the city’s population, and cut infant mortality and infant malnutrition by half.

The story struck me because in South Africa, our mayors and councils state that their mission is to create World Class Cities. What this usually translates to, is cities that are orientated to international business interests and foreign tourists. Often, in the quest for ‘World Class’ cities, most of the local residents get left behind.

I am still lost in a daydream of how our major cities might look and feel, if our mayors made it their mission to have cities in which nobody goes hungry. They might not be ‘World Class’, whatever that might mean, but they would surely be top class places to live for their own citizens.