This paper explores the possibilities of the nutrition-sensitive agriculture approach in the context of the programs and actions towards promoting food and nutrition sovereignty and security in Brazil. To analyze the links between nutrition and agriculture, this paper presents the conceptual framework related to food and nutrition security, and stresses the correlations among concepts, institutional structures and program design in Brazil. Dominant models of food production and consumption are scrutinized in the light of these relationships. This paper also highlights differences amongst different ways to promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture through food-acquisition programs from family farmers, experiences in agro-ecology and bio-fortification programs. In the closing remarks, the paper draws some lessons learned from the Brazilian experience that highlight the advantages of family farming and rapid food production, distribution and consumption cycles in order to promote access to an affordable, diversified and more adequate diet in nutritional terms.

The article analyses the Brazilian soy value chains using a justice-based, multi-scale approach following the international debate on just transition to sustainable and healthy food systems in the context of climate change. It highlights the challenges and limits to promote just transitions based on dominant global value chains, while assessing private strategies as false solutions for sustainability and climate change. The multi-scale approach allows for linking global trends and private strategies to their intersections with local and national food systems. Systemic drivers of inequalities together with parameters for promoting food and environmental justices are the backdrop of the approach.

This article describes a systemic approach to analyzing issues related to food and eating, starting with a review of the different meanings and uses of the notions of food systems and agri-food chains. A systemic, multi-scale approach is developed to support the proposed notion of decentralized food systems in an attempt to account for the complementarities, conflicts, and hybridisms that result from the coexistence of distinct food systems in terms of modes of production and distribution, flows of goods, and the shaping of eating habits. Special attention is paid to localities and respective territories as analytical spheres, with the introduction of empirical evidence from two studies conducted in the Brazilian localities of Juazeiro (Bahia) and Chapecó (Santa Catarina).

O artigo apresenta pesquisa desenvolvida pelo Observatório de Políticas Públicas para Agricultura (OPPA/CPDA), em parceria com o Instituto Interamericano de Cooperação para Agricultura (IICA), a qual buscou analisar as interfaces entre as políticas de desenvolvimento territorial e o enfrentamento da pobreza rural. Além de levantamento bibliográfico e documental, foram selecionados seis territórios da cidadania para pesquisa de campo, envolvendo várias entrevistas com representantes da sociedade civil e do poder público. Mais do que reconhecer as limitações do emprego da abordagem territorial nas políticas públicas, o artigo analisa os avanços e limitações no combate à pobreza rural. Os diferentes casos revelam a prevalência de políticas orientadas para a assistência social e certo arrefecimento das políticas que buscam alterações mais estruturais nas famílias rurais pobres.

The article aims to identify how systemic, multi-scale dynamics influence access to adequate and healthy food and eating and how food is produced and circulated in the Amazonian context of the Metropolitan Region of Santarém (PA). We conducted a literature review, qualitative interviews with key actors, discussion groups and visits to food retailers to address the following research questions: how do socio-economic and political dynamics, especially those related to the soy-meat agroindustrial complex, create or reproduce social inequalities, injustices and inequities, and how do they affect the access to adequate and healthy food? Our findings suggest that the expansion of large-scale soybean growing and livestock, forming the industrial soy-meat complex, contributes to the impoverishment of certain social segments of the local population, accompanied by the erosion of the base for food production. Smallholder farmers and Indigenous and traditional people are among the main affected groups, while violence in rural areas contributes to restricting access to adequate and healthy food. The novelties of our study lie in approaching food systems, taking access to food as the entry point and linking adverse effects of the soy-meat complex to inequalities in access to healthy food. The study also discusses value conflicts between “traditional” and “modern food” (e.g., ultra-processed food), reflecting intergenerational disputes between ways of life and culture, which are also nurtured by the expansion of the soy-meat complex. These multi-scale dynamics have significant repercussions on how food is produced and circulated and highlight the relations between local food politics and conflicts, as well as their connections with processes beyond the local scale. Finally, the article calls for advancing integrated and multi-scale analysis of food production and access to address challenges of social injustices in food system transitions, fostering sustainability, human health and climate change mitigation and adaptation.