Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the relation between the Human Right to Adequate Food (HRAF) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) resulting from a dialogic experience with children and adolescents in the periphery of São Vicente, São Paulo. Using the methodological framework of participatory research, community assemblies observation, and the partnership between the university and social movements point to a caring place for children/adolescents that enable collective diagnostic readings on food. Dialogical processes enable us to problematize HRAF dimensions based on the chain of food production, trading and consumption, and the instability to which those children/adolescents are subjected in a complex network of determinants that produce hunger and malnutrition in the territories in which they live. Results show that these dimensions dialogue with all the SDGs, as they demand cultural, economic, social, and environmental sustainability of food. The partnership and integration between university and society strengthens and enhances the spaces of social control and training of actors to advocate for the HRAF. It can also change inequalities in the territories and acknowledge children as subjects of rights with deep ethical commitment in the construction of inclusive listening and qualified practices.

Keywords:
Food Security; Sustainable Development; Community-Based Participatory Research; Child; Poverty Areas

Introduction

The topic of food in vulnerable urban peripheral territories gains visibility and complexity with the recommendations of social isolation resulting from the international emergency of the Covid-19 pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in January 2020 (WHO, 2020WHO - WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION. Director-General’s statement on IHR Emergency Committee on Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), Genebra, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-statement-onihr-emergency-committee-on-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov) >. Acesso em: 03 maio 2020.
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/w... ).

Although in 2014 Brazil left the Hunger Map, advances regarding the fall in the prevalence of moderate and severe food insecurity occurred unevenly. These are lower in the most vulnerable strata, with hunger still present in families without stable employment, residing in the peripheries of urban centers (Graziano, 2018GRAZIANO, J. O problema da fome não está na produção de alimentos - entrevista. Revista Radis, Rio de Janeiro, v. 186, p. 23-24, 2018., Frutuoso; Viana, 2021FRUTUOSO, M. F. P.; VIANA, C. V. A. Quem inventou a fome são os que comem: da invisibilidade à enunciação - uma discussão necessária em tempos de pandemia. Interface, Botucatu, v. 25, e200256, 2021. DOI: 10.1590/interface.200256
https://doi.org/10.1590/interface.200256... ). The Brazilian latest financial and political crisis had already been contributing to weaknesses in ensuring to more vulnerable populations the access to food. National data pointed out that the worst strata of employment, social support, and education were twice as likely to face food insecurity (Sousa et al., 2019SOUSA, L. R. M. et al. Food security status in times of financial and political crisis in Brazil. Cadernos de Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, n. 35, v. 7, e00084118, 2019. DOI: 10.1590/0102-311X00084118
https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-311X0008411... ).

In 2020 the structural, chronic and often invisible hunger, aggravated by the sustained social inequality and context of crisis, becomes part of the food scenarios of the peripheral urban territories jointly with the conjunctural, acute and visible hunger, suddenly produced by the pandemic - and by the social isolation that prevents individuals from keeping their source of income. Such income predominantly results from informal and precarious work, unveiling the huge Brazilian social inequalities. The civil society organization has contributed to emergent combat to hunger during the pandemic, with initiatives of support to community articulation, collective management and sharing of food, showing solidarity as a historical tool of social relations in peripheral territories (Silva Filho; Gomes Júnior, 2020SILVA FILHO, O. J.; GOMES JÚNIOR, N. N. The future at the kitchen table: COVID-19 and the food supply. Cadernos de Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, v. 36, n. 5, e00095220, 2020. DOI: 10.1590/0102-311X00095220
https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-311X0009522... ; Frutuoso; Viana, 2021FRUTUOSO, M. F. P.; VIANA, C. V. A. Quem inventou a fome são os que comem: da invisibilidade à enunciação - uma discussão necessária em tempos de pandemia. Interface, Botucatu, v. 25, e200256, 2021. DOI: 10.1590/interface.200256
https://doi.org/10.1590/interface.200256... ). This scenario invites us to strengthen the production of knowledge, and to think about the food agenda together with those who face hunger and food insecurity.

Thinking about a food agenda implies understanding nutritionally inadequate eating habits. These habits ensue from contemporary food systems, and result in several forms of malnutrition that make up a global syndemic characterized by pandemics of obesity, malnutrition, and climate change - with their effects on health and natural systems. This became more complex and visible, both internationally and locally, after the pandemic context (Swinburn et al, 2019SWINBURN, B. et al. The global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change: The Lancet Commission report. The Lancet, Nova York, v. 393, n. 10173, p. 791-846, 2019. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32822-8
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32... ; Ventura et al., 2020VENTURA, D. F. L.; RIBEIRO, H.; GIULIO, G. M.; JAIME, P. C.; NUNES, J.; BÓGUS, C. M. et al. Challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic: for a Brazilian research agenda in global health and sustainability. Cadernos de Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, v. 36, n. 4, e00040620, 2020. DOI: 10.1590/0102-311X00040620.
https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-311X0004062... ). Reflecting on this scenario’s management demands recognizing the Human Right to Adequate Food (HRAF), born from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: “an inherent human right for all people to have regular, permanent and unrestricted access, either directly or through financial acquisitions, to safe and healthy food, in adequate and sufficient quantity and quality, corresponding to the cultural traditions of their people, and ensuring a life free from fear, dignified and full in physical and mental, individual and collective dimensions” (Leão, 2013LEÃO M. (Org.). O Direito Humano à Alimentação Adequada e o Sistema Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional. Brasília, DF: ABRANDH - AÇÃO BRASILEIRA PELA NUTRIÇÃO E DIREITOS HUMANOS, 2013., p. 27, free translation).

It should be considered that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), as a global framework, established common principles for the protection of the human person’s fundamental rights at a standard of living capable of ensuring health and well-being without discrimination (UN, 1948UN - United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Disponível em: Disponível em: https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/217(III)&Lang=E . Acesso em: 07 abr. 2022.
https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.as... ).

With the insertion of this normative principle, in 2010 the Brazilian 1988 Federal Constitution formalized, among social rights, the fundamental guarantee of the right to food through Constitutional Amendment No. 64/2010, ratified by Amendment # 90/2015 (Brasil, 2015BRASIL. Emenda Constitucional nº 90, de 15 de setembro de 2015. Altera o art. 6º da Constituição Federal. Diário Oficial da União, Brasília, DF, 16 set. 2015.). More than elementary and obvious, legal formalism ratifies the UDHR to guarantee the HRAF.

In Brazil, the normative institutionalization of the HRAF was substantiated through the Organic Law on Food and Nutrition Security (Lei Orgânica de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional, LOSAN), which allowed a national legal order with instruments to propose public policies, i.e., “the LOSAN as the first legal framework for the HRAF implied the formal institution of this right” (Guerra; Cervato-Mancuso; Bezerra , 2019GUERRA, L. D. S., CERVATO-MANCUSO, A. M., BEZERRA, A. C. D. Alimentação: um direito humano em disputa - focos temáticos para compreensão e atuação em segurança alimentar e nutricional. Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, Rio de Janeiro, v. 24, n. 9, p. 3369-3394, 2019. DOI: 10.1590/1413-81232018249.20302017
https://doi.org/10.1590/1413-81232018249... , p. 3370, free translation).

The Constitutional Amendment, therefore, ratified food among the social rights that are supported by the Constitution becomes an essential instrument for imposing responsibilities to the State regarding provision of adequate food so as to ensure that every person has physical and economic access to adequate food.

The HRAF takes on indivisible and fundamental dimensions: the right to be free from hunger and malnutrition, and the right to have access to proper means to obtain adequate food. Guaranteeing this right also means ensuring Food and Nutrition Security (FNS), i.e., adequate food in quantity and quality through health-promoting, environmentally, culturally, socially, and economically sustainable food practices (Brasil, 2006BRASIL. Lei nº 11.346 de 15 de setembro de 2006. Cria o Sistema Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional - SISAN com vistas a assegurar o direito humano à alimentação adequada e dá outras providências. Diário Oficial da União, Brasília, DF, 18 set. 2006.).

FNS is the result of efficient, sustainable, and nutrition-sensitive food systems. That means thinking about production chains, food trade, environments, and food practices (Fao, 2019FAO - FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS. FAO framework for the urban food agenda. Rome: FAO, 2019.; HLPE, 2017HLPE. Nutrition and food systems. A report by the high-level panel of experts on food security and nutrition of the committee on world food security. Rome: HLPE; 2017.). Assuming the direct relation between food systems and food insecurity, this agenda relates to all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), insofar as eating habits result from a complex and multifactorial network that directly influences the four prisms of FNS: food availability from production to trade; access to food, including food choices; biological use of food; and stability in maintaining adequate diet both in quantitative and qualitative terms (Leão, 2013LEÃO M. (Org.). O Direito Humano à Alimentação Adequada e o Sistema Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional. Brasília, DF: ABRANDH - AÇÃO BRASILEIRA PELA NUTRIÇÃO E DIREITOS HUMANOS, 2013.; Ipes-Food, 2019IPES-FOOD - INTERNATIONAL PANEL OF EXPERTS ON SUSTANABLE FOOD SYSTEMS. Towards a common food policy for the European Union. The policy reform and realignment that is required to build sustainable food systems in Europe. Europe: IPES-FOOD, 2019.).

Taking into consideration the issue of food insecurity in urban spaces, situations of poverty and social inequality directly interfere with food in households. This may result in different gradients of food insecurity, including the most severe insecurity, hunger and strategies for obtaining/acquiring food. In this context, health production in cities, especially in peripheral territories, requires the community’s agencing for critical thinking, and for coping with situations of rights violations, including the HRAF, connecting health promotion and the SDGs.

The Brazilian experience in building public policies on food and nutrition, taking the HRAF and SAN as guidelines, points to cross-sector articulations and governance mechanisms from instances of dialogue with the intense participation of civil society, such as the Food Security Council (Conselho de Segurança Alimentar, CONSEA), extinguished in 2019 (Silva et al., 2018SILVA, A. C. F. et al. History and challenges of Brazilian social movements for the achievement of the right to adequate food. Global Public Health, Abingdon, v. 14, p. 875-883, 2018. DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2018.1439516
https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2018.14... ; Frutuoso; Viana, 2021FRUTUOSO, M. F. P.; VIANA, C. V. A. Quem inventou a fome são os que comem: da invisibilidade à enunciação - uma discussão necessária em tempos de pandemia. Interface, Botucatu, v. 25, e200256, 2021. DOI: 10.1590/interface.200256
https://doi.org/10.1590/interface.200256... ).

From a broad perspective, promoting health, FNS and HRAF implies working together with individuals, families and communities, taking into consideration their living conditions, developing actions that seek to foster healthy choices in the territories. It also means expanding the autonomy and power of actors and local management instances; deeply knowing the territorial dynamics; establishing pacts and local partnerships; fostering participation and cross-sector and interdisciplinary action networks, including new actors in management; developing working methods and techniques, experimenting, reviewing and modifying them (Mendes; Fernandez; Sacardo, 2016MENDES, R.; FERNANDEZ, J. C. A.; SACARDO, D. Promoção da saúde e participação: abordagens e indagações. Saúde em Debate, Rio de Janeiro, v. 40, n. 108, p. 190-203, 2016. DOI: 10.1590/0103-1104-20161080016
https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-1104-201610... ).

Methods

This is a qualitative research based on the CBPR (Community-Based Participatory Research) conceptual model developed by the University of New Mexico - USA. The CBPR guides the identification and analysis of cooperative relationships and practices between partners in several areas, based on four domains: context; partnership processes; intervention and research; and results.

In practice, the model represents the main features of any project’s partnership, its social context, and the potential range of the most relevant results, as well as medium- and long-term goals such as empowerment, knowledge democracy, health equity, and social justice (Wallerstein; Duran, 2010WALLERSTEIN, N.; DURAN, D. Community-Based Participatory Research contributions to intervention research: the intersection of science and practice to improve health equity. American Journal in Public Health, Washington, DC, suppl 1, p. S40-S46, 2010. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.184036
https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.184036... ; Kastelic et al., 2018KASTELIC, S. et al. Socio-ecologic framework for CBPR: development and testing of a model. In: WALLERSTEIN, N. et al. (ed.) Community-Based Participatory Research for health: advancing social and health equity. 3. ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2018. p. 77-94.).

Considering the CBPR principles regarding the dialogue between the subjects engaged in the research process and in coping with social inequalities, in the first stage a Management Group (Grupo Gestor, GG) was established. The GG was intended to bring people together for decision-making, and to carry out all stages of the research, as well as for the theoretical deepening of the research topics. One of the first activities of the GG was to identify the partnerships of the Instituto Camará Calunga, a civil society organization that has been developing actions with children and adolescents in the vulnerable peripheries of São Vicente, in São Paulo, since 1997.

Through the biased view of the colonizers, the city of São Vicente is known as the first city in Brazil. However, its alleged historical pioneering spirit does not ensure a fair and sustainable development of basic human rights in health, education or housing. Indicators from the State of São Paulo rank the municipality as vulnerable, with low longevity and schooling (Seade, 2019SEADE - FUNDAÇÃO SISTEMA ESTADUAL DE ANÁLISE DE DADOS. Índice Paulista de Responsabilidade Social - IPRS. Versão 2019. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://iprs.seade.gov.br/downloads/pdf/iprs_release_site.pdf >. Acesso em: 10 abr. 2022.
https://iprs.seade.gov.br/downloads/pdf/... ). In 2019, infant mortality in São Vicente was 14.7 - a value close to the average of the Baixada Santista region (15.0), which reports the highest rates in the state (Seade, 2019SEADE - FUNDAÇÃO SISTEMA ESTADUAL DE ANÁLISE DE DADOS. Mortalidade infantil por região, 2019. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://produtos2.seade.gov.br/produtos2/mortalidade_infantil/mortalidade-infantil-2019/?periodo=2019&short=16 >. Acesso em: 20 ago. 2022.
https://produtos2.seade.gov.br/produtos2... ).

In this scenario, Camará heavily invests in community mobilization in articulation with public policies. Bearing the institutional mission of promoting the defense of human rights in the many places and territories where children and adolescents live, it intends - and has ensured - the production of referential experiences of care, critical training, research and intervention that influence the formulation of public policies for children and youth.

Camará develops a management methodology through community assemblies, where children and adolescents, in school or domestic spaces in their territories, sit together and try critical and collective nourishing experiences. These assemblies mobilize the community every week to produce experiences that end up establishing their first democratic praxis: reflective processes on their daily conditions, social issues, and the conditions of the territories.

In a round conversation children, adolescents, younger siblings, parents, and neighbors elect the important themes: evaluation of a meeting/activity, organization of a cultural expedition, flood, school, violence, health, vaccines, etc. Everyone listens. The theme is presented by the person who proposes it, and the floor is open for everyone to contribute.

There is a radical commitment toward listening and opportunities for everyone to contribute from their own perspectives and, above all, to listen to analyses from other perspectives, in order to produce critical thinking. If the theme requires deliberation or decision-making, it is discussed until a common position is agreed upon. Voting is avoided, as it is understood as an individual way out sometimes co-opted by a neoliberal logic. The common here is not understood as a consensus, but as a place that holds contradictions and differences, besides embracing the complexities of adults and children in community.

The GG identified, among Camará’s partnerships, the Nutrition course at UNIFESP - Baixada Santista (BS) that, since 2016, has proposed actions with children and adolescents on the theme of hunger and HRAF. These actions started from the articulation of the curricular internship in Social Nutrition; the extension Project “Saberes e sabores: a Nutrição em diálogos”, which proposes interdisciplinary experiences encompassing the possible - and powerful - dialogues about food; and the Terra Sonâmbula Project, which discussed the right to land in its perspective related to housing and food, inserting food as a cross-sectional thematic axis in the educational rooms of Camará devoted to thinking about the processes of integral literacy. This articulation invested in participative strategies based on collective constructions developed in the territories where children, adolescents and families live.

This article focuses on the research findings from the first two domains of the CBPR Model: context and partnership processes that point to a range of issues central to the investigation. It also intends to analyze the relations between the HRAF and the SDGs that emerge from dialogic actions with children and adolescents in vulnerable urban peripheries of São Vicente, São Paulo.

Results and discussion

We start from the contextualization of the territory, considering the ‘periphery’ of Kowarick and Bonduki (1994KOWARICK, L.; BONDUKI, N. Espaço urbano e espaço político: do populismo à redemocratização. In: KOWARICK, L. (org.) As lutas sociais e a cidade: São Paulo, passado e presente. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1994. p. 147-177.) considered not only as places of absence or lack, but agglomerations endowed with intense sociability: help among neighbors, conversations, contacts, solidarities and conflicts. These are typical interactions of primary relationships woven in adversity, in the confrontation between insiders and outsiders, or in the search for social and political rights. The struggles experienced in the daily life of contrasts stand out, highlighting what urban planning based on the construction of urban peripheries has failed to eliminate, despite the attempt to push the poor away to the most hidden scene of the city (Barreira, 2010BARREIRA, I. A. F. Cidade, atores e processos sociais: o legado sociológico de Lúcio Kowarick. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, São Paulo, v. 25, n. 72, p. 149-159, 2010. DOI: 10.1590/S0102-69092010000100011
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-6909201000... ).

The context: community assemblies as a space for collective diagnostic readings on food and the relationship with the SDGs

The experiences and experimentations of collective doings in the partnership under analysis start from the historical construction of Camará’s actions, having as a prerogative the decisive roles of civil society under the policies that interfere and, many times, determine social realities.

The community assemblies create “collective democratic spaces, where decisions are effectively made, conflicts are negotiated, and structural and functional reforms of a democratic nature are designed. Wouldn’t that be a new way of doing politics?” (Campos, 2015CAMPOS, G. W. S. Um método para análise e cogestão de coletivos. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2015., p. 48, free translation). Thus, we recognize in the assemblies the exercise of the capacity for critical analysis and intervention, demystifying the place of children and adolescents as those who cannot or do not reach critical maturity in the reading of territories, or who are incapable of interfering in their realities.

Assemblies become an important training space for all actors involved, as it calls for “openness, on the part of adults, to listen to these new interlocutors and, above all, in the boldness of being challenged in their unwavering position in front of it, that of being the only one who has the power to define situations” (Castro, 2013CASTRO, L. R. O futuro da infância e outros escritos. Rio de Janeiro: 7letras, 2013., p. 106, free translation). By exercising the dynamics of the round conversation and of listening - with children and adolescents for their education, it is also building democracy. We are stating the prompt need in these struggles to combine the deconstruction of adultcentrism and the strengthening of participation methodologies that take into account the language and temporality of children in their readings of the world (Martins; Viana, 2020MARTINS, E. C.; VIANA, C. V. A. Representação da infância e representatividade infante: posições ético-políticas. Psicologia Clínica, Rio de Janeiro, v. 32, n. 1, p. 151-172, 2020. DOI: 10.33208/PC1980-5438v0032n01A07
https://doi.org/10.33208/PC1980-5438v003... ).

The participant’s observation of assemblies in the various territories where Camará operates has served as a reference to expand the discussions produced therein, leading to the demand for the theme of food, driven by the children and adolescents who participate in these spaces. The real experience of hunger and food insecurity were the initial triggers for the partnerships that were being built with the University and the shared actions among the mentioned projects, always agreed upon in assemblies with teachers, students, educators, children, and adolescents.

Taking the topic of food, the assemblies enable collective diagnostic readings on food insecurity, hunger, and HRAF that are related to all SDGs and are explicitly announced in SDG 2: “zero hunger and sustainable agriculture”, which encompasses the HRAF dimension of being free from hunger. For the group under review, it is about ending hunger and ensuring access for all people, particularly the poor and people in vulnerable situations - including children - to safe, nutritious, and enough food throughout the year.

It is in this context - of the complexity to guarantee food in the territories where these children live - that the partnership under review bet, without exhausting it, on the discussion about the determinants of FNS and the SDGs, as an important guide and beacon in the fight for HRAF.

In this scenario, the “localization” of the SDGs may enable the support of bottom-up actions, which “...do not simply imply a direct translation of global policies into local contexts. Rather, it implies fostering a process based on the empowerment and articulation of local actors, targeted to achieving sustainable development through actions relevant to the local population, according to their needs and aspirations” (CNM, 2017CNM - CONFEDERAÇÃO NACIONAL DE MUNICÍPIOS. Guia para Integração dos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável nos Municípios Brasileiros - Gestão 2017-2020, Brasília, DF: CNM, 2017., p. 20, free translation).

Assemblies were then configured as a room to recognize the availability of food that children have in their territories, based on the collective construction of activities to track the points of sale; discussions about the supply of foodstuff and the forces that influence it (such as the dynamics of drug trafficking in the region); and the limitations that these forces bring on the families’ food repertoire.

The children live in insular and continental territories, far from the commercial center of the city, which directly interferes with the presence of establishments that sell food that, in general, are small, with little variety and abusive prices. In describing these stores, children highlight the ones that sell sandwiches, açai and sweets, and mention the food sold on the street.

What possibilities and collective experiences can be thought of based on these references brought by the children? What other lines of power can make up this network? This way, children start reflecting about food environments as mediators between the system and the food practices, and dependent on the geographic, economic, political and sociocultural context where they live.

SDG 9 is part of the agenda: “industry, innovation and infrastructure” advocating for the promotion of inclusive and sustainable industrialization. Industrialization, in the light of HRAF, brings the global context of large-scale food production by transnational companies, which contributes to increased consumption of ultra-processed, low-nutritional quality food responsible for eating patterns that produce malnutrition and that are very present in the territories studied.

In the context of these children, SDG 16: “peace, justice and effective institutions” emerges in the component of territorial lines of power that control even the food supply, bringing this SDG closer to the HRAF.

The food environments to ensure HRAF bring other characteristics of the territory into the discussion: places with soil contaminated by chemical waste, and lack of basic sanitation in precarious housing such as slums, stilt houses, and squatter settlements. Places with constant flooding and inundations, which prevent people from circulating to work, study, and buy food. The life in the mangrove is also highlighted. For children and adolescents, it is a place of leisure that provides the crab that is consumed and sold by the families. We revisit Josué de Castro’s discussions about life in the mangroves of Recife and the production of hunger.

This context dialogues with a set of SDGs: 11, “sustainable cities and communities”; 13, “action against global climate change”; 14, “life in water”; and 15, “terrestrial life”. In the reality of the collective of children living in these peripheral coastal regions, it means debating the access to safe housing, basic services, and inclusive and sustainable urbanization, and assuming that the food consumed is directly related to climate change, the preservation of marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems.

These SDGs emphasize the promotion of mechanisms to discuss the issues with a focus on women, youth, local and marginalized communities. Here we add the SDG 12: “responsible consumption and production”, which provides for reducing food waste, environmentally sound management of chemicals and all waste, and ensuring that people discuss sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature.

When thinking about the dimension of the right to have access to the means to obtain adequate food in the territories where children live, we necessarily need to build discussions that go beyond income and work, a theme that crosses very strongly the lives of children and adolescents in urban vulnerability. The early insertion in informal work is becoming an increasingly urgent need. It is based on this scenario that we will build with the children the reading of the families’ income and financial stability and the construction of ways out, such as a social support network and, depending on the severity of the scenarios, the collective construction of this network. Here we take SDG 1: “poverty eradication”, which puts the right to economic resources and social protection on the agenda, and SDG 8: “decent work and economic growth”, which promotes support for productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation; and the eradication of child labor. We emphasize the component of labor rights protection that stands out in the Brazilian scenario in recent years, in a process of rights setback.

In the context where these children live the guarantee of participation in conditional cash transfer programs is a topic for discussion. How can this guarantee be supported? To what extent do the programs contribute to reducing hunger? What is the contribution of resources for the purchase of food? Does child labor determine a scenario of food insecurity or satisfy hunger? These analyses will be part of the discussion with children about the construction of effective public policies to guarantee the HRAF.

The walks and mapping of territories, as well as the daily reports of the assemblies serve as a substrate for the reading of how food, if available, can be used in alleged unhealthy housing scenarios, of lack of access to drinking water, basic sanitation, cooking gas. These are associated with SDG 6: “clean water and sanitation”, which deals with universal and equitable access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene; and SDG 7: “clean and affordable energy”. The analysis of HRAF’s dimensions includes the right to water and the abusive prices of cooking gas and electricity, which directly impact the handling and storage of food (in a refrigerator, for example) and the choice considering the need for cooking.

The problem is what measures children can take regarding cooking skills and hygiene practices and preservation of the food to which they have access. Practices that recognize children as active and critical subjects in their realities: the scenario where children and adolescents cook and are responsible for feeding their younger siblings; where supporting networks of neighbors are built in the absence of parents due to their long working hours (often in underemployment or informal jobs), and the absolute fragility of daycare vacancies.

This scenario takes up SDG 8, and brings us back to the discussion of SDG 4: “quality education” and SDG 5: “gender equality”. Schools, teaching, and school feeding are constant topics in the assemblies and demand discussions about the guarantee of care and education since early childhood. Most participants in the assemblies are girls/women, and there are frequent discussions about discrimination and violence in the public and private spheres, as well as domestic chores and care work, which includes responsibility for all the family’s feeding stages.

Health care is on the agenda of the meetings, focusing on frequent problems such as difficult access to health services, infectious and waterborne diseases, substance abuse, and sexual and reproductive health, including family planning. These themes dialogue with SDG 3: “health and well-being”.

Assemblies are consistently permeated by the discussion of SDG 10: “reduction of inequalities”, in the dialogue on social, economic and political inclusion of all, regardless of age, gender, race, religion, economic condition.

In the process, spaces for welcoming and collective thinking are built, and the children expand their reading of the scenario that produces hunger and food insecurity in their territories, recognizing the deep instability to which they are subjected. In this sense, HRAF has a complex relationship with the SDGs, both in the dimension of the right to be free from hunger and malnutrition, and the right to physical and economic access to food, but also to water, education, health, and housing, among others.

The search for sustainable development means meeting current needs without compromising future generations, based on economic (SDG 7 to 12), social (SDG 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), and environmental (SDG 6, 13 to 15) perspectives, which are in direct dialogue with the food agenda, even if this issue is not explicit in the SDG goals.

Of the partnership processes: strengthening, sustainability and interferences

The partnership between the University and Camará invites us to think about hunger and HRAF in vulnerable urban peripheries, besides broadening our understanding of these concepts in micro territorial experiences. Faced with population indicators that pointed to a reduction and now announce an increase in hunger in Brazil, and the imperative need to discuss access to land and the production, distribution, and consumption of food, how can we conceive, in these spaces, actions that find a place and effects in the discussion, but also produce experiences that review and redefine the relationship with food and hunger, and inspire concrete changes in the scenario of non-access to food?

As researchers and educators who recognize in childhood and youth a powerful room for inventive productions, with investment in procedural and structural changes, the challenge has been to build with children and adolescents collective actions that are referential for the formulation of public policies. This means co-existing with those who live the experience of hunger and situations of violation of the HRAF, building possibilities of understanding and critically analyzing the production of this experience, and proposing actions that displace the subordination or the Malthusian conformism of this scenario (Frutuoso; Viana, 2021FRUTUOSO, M. F. P.; VIANA, C. V. A. Quem inventou a fome são os que comem: da invisibilidade à enunciação - uma discussão necessária em tempos de pandemia. Interface, Botucatu, v. 25, e200256, 2021. DOI: 10.1590/interface.200256
https://doi.org/10.1590/interface.200256... ).

The Malthusian theory, disseminated and advocated by Thomas Malthus, pointed to hunger as a natural law of life as a way to reduce the number of people and ensure balance in face of increasing population, limited land and food production. From a fatalistic reading of human history, resulting from a process of natural selection and demographic regulation, hunger was considered a taboo until the mid-twentieth century (Ziegler, 2013ZIEGLER, J. Destruição em massa: geopolítica da fome. São Paulo: Cortez, 2013.).

The current debate about hunger, food insecurity, and HRAF implies problematizing poverty and all elements related to the food production chain in a complex network of determinants. This multifactorial production of hunger invites us all to build critical analyses that may range from daily micro-policies to the production of effects and provocations in macro-policies. It is in this sense that this experience of collective work with children and adolescents, as well as their respective care and protection networks, may produce methodological references or interferences in public policies that cross related themes. This intention has as its prerogative the decisive roles that civil society plays under the policies that interfere with, and often so strongly determine, social realities.

When this place of incidence in public policies is affirmed, it is necessary to invest in the importance of integrating the instances not only of formulation, but also of social control, as well as contributing to the permanent education of social workers and educators, as throughout its history it interferes, in the criticism and fight for the guarantee of rights. This specific approach to childhood and adolescence provides methodologies for coexistence and political training, inviting children and adolescents to participate in local policies in an effective and dialogical way, as well as provoking institutional actors to listen to the realities and experiences of these subjects in situations of rights violation.

The Public Policy Councils, institutional spaces guaranteed to civil society in the social control of these policies in Brazil, have been places where Camará’s work exerts pressure, including the Municipal Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents (Conselho Municipal dos Direitos da Criança e do Adolescente, CMDCA), the Social Assistance Council and CONSEA. With the strategy of integrating and connecting the experiences, readings, diagnoses, and analyses produced by children, adolescents, and their families in their territories to the debates and formulation of municipal public policy, Camará has been gaining space and disseminating these participatory methodologies at the state level. It also became member of national and international networks, working daily in the political training of children and young people so that they can occupy and guide these spaces based on their daily experiences. These movements reinforce the active participation of civil society in the process of designing, implementing, and monitoring public policies on food and nutrition and FNA (Silva et al., 2018SILVA, A. C. F. et al. History and challenges of Brazilian social movements for the achievement of the right to adequate food. Global Public Health, Abingdon, v. 14, p. 875-883, 2018. DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2018.1439516
https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2018.14... ), which have been called into question by the recent extinction of CONSEA.

Awarded in the category Actions and Experiences of the National Award of the National Movement for Human Rights - MNDH (2015) and recognized as having a national impact in the Itaú-Unicef Comprehensive Education Award (2019), Camará’s participatory methodologies and articulated work have been gaining power and attracting partners in the construction of other possibilities for analysis, production and mobilization. The strengthening of projects that come closer to the HRAF thematic has found partnership and support with UNIFESP-BS.

With visibility to those who have been systematically disallowed in the political field, children have been increasingly recognized as those who incite and strengthen several other reflections in the social field, making them effective subjects of utterance of their own rights, or of the violation of them. This breaking of silence chains and critical analysis of local realities may become an important ally in guaranteeing FNS policies and fighting hunger.

Recognizing these potentialities, in 2020 UNIFESP-BS, Camará, and the Municipal Government of São Vicente formalized a tripartite agreement that aims to strengthen collective actions of children and adolescents in the production of referential experiences that influence public policies, and produce transformative effects on the exorbitant inequalities in their territories.

The production of collective projects by municipal institutional actors, researchers, professors, undergraduate and graduate students, and children and adolescents from vulnerable territories has proven to be a powerful device for the collective production of reviewers of the HRAF and hunger in these peripheries. And this agreement is inspired, among other experiences, in the production of pilot projects and training methodologies and experiences in those themes.

In face of this collaborative structure, there is an intrinsic relationship with SDG 17: “partnerships and means of implementation”, materialized in relationships that are motivating and encouraging for the promotion of partnerships with civil society, academia, and public institutions. In the agenda for urban food these partnerships mean ensuring effective public policies (Fao, 2019FAO - FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS. FAO framework for the urban food agenda. Rome: FAO, 2019.).

Final considerations

The analysis of the first two domains of the CBPR model context and processes of the partnership in focus, between Camará and UNIFESP-BS, suggests an experience of training local actors: students, teachers, educators, children and adolescents and family members, for mobilization and discussion on the HRAF and dialogue with the SDGs in peripheral areas of the city of São Vicente. In the next research stages, we will advance in the discussion of the third and fourth domains of the CBPR model - interventions and outcomes. The challenge here is to break away from vertical and tight research approaches, and to bet on articulation and the power to act in favor of dialogue and interaction to activate new ways of building health-promoting practices.

The narrative on hunger and HRAF announces the need to problematize poverty, social inequalities, and elements related to the food production chain in a complex network of determinants that comes close to the essential strategy of all SDGs and illustrate the 2030 Agenda in its dimension of localizing the SDGs, including to contextualize the vitality of this instrument of sustainable development. The production of collective projects among the many actors has proven to be a powerful device for the collective production of reviewers of the HRAF and hunger, through community assemblies in the territories and curricular teaching, research and extension actions with children at the places where they live.

It is noteworthy that the ethical-political shift of recognizing children and adolescents as subjects of rights brings with it a deep ethical commitment in the construction of inclusive listening and of skilled practices to expand the democratic and political power of the many subjects inserted in the social field. The collective spaces of the assemblies will ensure a place of shelter and collective thinking for positive interference in this scenario, by the hands of those who make their own reading.

Thinking about this experience, in times of pandemic, invites us to invest in the production of critical thinking with those who live in vulnerable urban peripheral territories and who, even today, face situations of hunger and food insecurity. In the words of Audre Lorde (2000LORDE, A. A Litany for Survival. In: LORDE, A. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.):

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