O acesso dos agricultores familiares prioritários ao Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE): o caso do município de Capão do Leão, RS

Abstract

The National Program of School Meals (PNAE) developed in Brazil is one of the largests in Latin America, reaching approximately 50 million students, providing at least one meal a day. The program has been developed in the country since 1955 and has suffered modifications with the aim of improving food security and nutrition of schoolchildren; as well as local development, through the strengthening of family agriculture. Since 2009, the Federal law 11.947, requires that the minimum investment of 30% among the financial resources of the program to purchase food must be spent with this social category, prioritizing: agrarian reform settlements, indigenous and Quilombola communities and those with ecological/organic production. This descriptive research, sought to identify the actions developed by public managers from Capão do Leão/RS, for the purchase of food from local and regional farmers. This town was chosen because besides having two land reform settlements, consisting of 36 families, which provide no foodgrade for PNAE; it acquires food produced by farmers with basic ecological production from Pelotas. So, we also understand the social and productive dynamics of these groups in order to identify the reasons that allow the participation of one, while the other cannot access the program. The results show that the social and productive organization of family farmers of ecological basis from Pelotas, which integrate the South Ecological Cooperative and the access to information about the operationalization of the PNAE, are crucial to the participation of these subjects. The factors that restrict the participation of family farmers settled by agrarian reform, which integrate the priority of public food source to PNAE, are: the asymmetry of information between this group and the managers of the municipality and the structural problems that they face. Thus, PNAE in Capão do Leão has not fully reached their goals, especially regarding to the promotion of local development.