Ending hunger rather than perpetuating it under agribusiness goes hand-in- hand with tackling inequality and climate change.
Raj Patel is Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin
Produced by Lynn Fries / GPEnewsdocs
LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. As stated by IPES-Food experts –
Today, we produce more food per person than ever before. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist in every corner of the globe – even and increasingly in some of its wealthiest countries… History has shown us again and again that, so long as inequality goes unchecked, no amount of technology can ensure people are fed… Without confronting power, the harvest will never reach the hungry.
That extract was from – Only politics can end world hunger – published by Jennifer Clapp as an IPES-Food statement on food access.
The challenge of politics and world hunger will be put in the spotlight at the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP30. This 30th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC will be hosted by Brazil in Belém, Nov 10-21.
Under the leadership of Brazil addressing food systems is a key pillar of the Action Agenda at COP30.
After years of rising hunger, this year Brazil was removed from the United Nations Hunger Map. This was made official by the UN in July with the publication of the UN 2025 report – The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World.
In their commentary – Brazil Beats Hunger – IPES-Food experts, Raj Patel & Elisabetta Recine, say Brazil’s success in ending hunger is sending a timely signal to world leaders that tackling hunger, inequality and the climate crisis together is achievable and replicable? So, why? And how did Brazil end hunger?
To explore these questions, this segment presents key takeaways from that Brazil Beats Hunger commentary. And from Raj Patel’s OPED – No Beef Here, Brazil Beat Hunger the Right Way. As well as a GPEnewsdocs clip on Brazil’s food system with guest, Raj Patel.
Raj Patel is Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Elisabetta Recine is President of Consea, the Brazilian National Food and Nutrition Security Council. Comprised of civil society and government representatives, this council advises the Lula government on its hunger policy. Consea was made a cornerstone of Lula’s flagship Zero Hunger program in 2003; dismantled by Bolsonaro in 2019 and reinstated by Lula in 2023.
In their Brazil Beats Hunger commentary, Patel & Recine state:
Brazil’s incredible success shows no one needs to go hungry – that hunger is a choice. Ending hunger isn’t some technological puzzle. What works is backing family farmers over agribusiness, investing in school meals, public programmes, and access to food. These aren’t utopian ideals, they’re proven tools. The only question is, will other governments act with the same courage?
In his OPED No Beef Here. Brazil Beat Hunger the Right Way, Patel explains:
Brazil’s food system is one of contradictions. As the world’s largest exporter of beef and soybeans, it remains under the thumb of agribusiness. Globally, agriculture is responsible for a third of human-sourced global emissions, and in Brazil, those interests are driving the destruction of the Amazon, fueling a climate crisis that’s destabilizing trade and food supplies world over. Yet Brazil has also returned to being a state that feeds its people with climate-smart, social policies, creating a national food system few have been able to achieve.
While agribusiness drives 80 percent of Amazon-forest loss and pushes industrial monocultures vulnerable to pests and climate shocks, family farmers practice regenerative techniques that rebuild soil, sequester carbon, and preserve biodiversity.
When returning to office in 2023, as Brazil’s President Lula made hunger eradication his top priority. He drew from a well-established playbook, one his previous administration had written. As noted at the open, after years of rising hunger, in 2025 Brazil was removed from the United Nations Hunger Map. In his OPED, Patel notes:
Three years ago, 33 million Brazilians went to bed hungry. Today, Brazil is off the United Nations Hunger Map, an achievement marked not by markets or multinationals, but a return to policies that put people and farmers first.
Patel goes on to say:
In a perfectly democratic world, such policies would have been well established. This agenda was demanded by Brazil’s small farmers, who constitute 77 percent of all Brazilian farmers and produce over two-thirds of the food consumed domestically. Yet they control just a quarter of the country’s farmland and receive less than a fifth of public credit. Today, just 1 percent of Brazilian farms control nearly half the land. In 2023-2024, agribusiness received more than four times the public financing granted to smallholders, despite being the sector the most responsible for land concentration, emissions, and export-driven deforestation.
As noted earlier, agribusiness drives 80 percent of Amazon-forest loss. An intertwined dynamic where the exploitation of nature goes hand-in-hand with privileging of a few and marginalization of the many is not new. It is a centuries-old structure of power whose origins are visible in Belém.
As gateway to the Amazon, the port city of Belém was founded by the Portuguese to secure the Crown’s control over the Amazon. Belém was the first European outpost for the colonial extraction of the rainforest’s resources.
Today, Belém is a major hub within the nexus of the export-driven deforestation Patel just referred to. Brazil’s agribusiness interests reap immense profits from these exports. Furthermore, agribusiness exports represent a massive share of Brazil’s GPD crucial for Brazil’s trade balance. This under a world economic system valorizing export led growth.
Agribusiness’s subsequent reputation as Brazil’s “engine of growth” and the framing of its massive scale, efficiency and technological innovation as mission-critical for feeding the world has been shaped under decades of mainstream economics dominance over policy making.
In a world where this economic paradigm prevails as the dominant ideology and so conventional wisdom, it is not so hard to understand how agribusiness could get so much leverage over Brazil’s political and economic system.
For more background on Brazil’s food system and on the ending of hunger in Brazil, I spoke with Raj Patel. Here is a clip from that briefing.
RAJ PATEL: Brazil ended hunger under the Lula administration in the 2010s by doing a range of pretty straightforward things. They made sure that the farmers who were growing food sustainably were supported in getting their food to market. They made sure that the supply chain was robust. And they made sure that farmers, if they were growing food agroecologically, were able to get paid a premium of 30 percent. And they made sure that families were able to have access not just to this food, but to income they needed in order to be able to survive.
All of these programs – Bolsa Familia, Fome Zero [Zero Hunger] and this new sort of Agricultural Purchasing Act – all of these are tried and tested ways of being able to make sure that that hunger goes away.
Under the Bolsonaro administration – which is much tighter with agribusiness than Lula was – the Bolsonaro administration gave up on the hunger programs. And predictably hunger went back up again. When Bolsonaro lost the election, Lula returned and returned those policies that had been proven to work – back again.
And what does this show? Well, it shows first of all, that you have a Brazil with two different food systems in it. An industrial agricultural one and a more sustainable family farm one. But it also shows that industrial agriculture is so powerful that it’s able to make hunger come back again. That’s how powerful they are.
You can see that – under the Lulu administration – ending hunger isn’t rocket science. You can end hunger like that if you choose these policies. And I think that’s the lesson here.
We’ve seen sort of myth-making around the world about: Well, we need technology to end hunger. We need genetically modified this, that and the other. And in fact, here’s a very straightforward case study with a country [Brazil] that has genetically modified soy everywhere.
Do genetically modified crops end hunger? Of course, they don’t.
Because the problem was never that the crop was genetically modified or not. It’s that the people who sell genetic modification are too powerful. And when you give them power and they seize yet more power, hunger goes up.
So, in a way, Brazil is the perfect example for people who believe that technological fixes are the way to end hunger. This is what happens when you give the people who are in charge of those technological fixes – who make money from those technological fixes – when you give them the reins in a country where hunger has been going down, hunger goes back up again.
I think when you come to think about Brazil, particularly Brazil at the COP30, think about Brazil as a sort of schizophrenic case. On the one hand, being driven by the worst of industrial agricultural profit motives. And on the other hand, having some really viable and vibrant social movement driven alternatives to actually end hunger rather than to perpetuate it under agribusiness.
FRIES: As a further critique of the belief that we need technology to end hunger, I will just return to the IPES-Food statement on food access cited at the open. More specifically to round off the point that – Today, we produce more food than ever before. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist in every corner of the globe – even and increasingly in some of its wealthiest countries. In this IPES-Food statement, Jennifer Clapp then goes on to point out:
The urgency of the hunger crisis has prompted 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates to call for “moonshot” technological innovations to boost food production. However, they largely ignored hunger’s root causes – and the need to confront powerful actors and make courageous political choices.
To focus almost exclusively on promoting agricultural technologies to ramp up food production would be to repeat the mistakes of the past. The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought impressive advances in crop yields (at considerable environmental cost). But it failed to eliminate hunger, because it didn’t address inequality.
Take Iowa, home to some of the most industrialized food production in the planet. Amid its high-tech corn and soy farms, 11% of the state’s population and one in six of its children, struggle to access food.
The world already produces more than enough food to feed everyone. Yet it is shamefully misallocated. Selling food to poor people at affordable prices simply isn’t as profitable for giant food corporations. They make far more by exporting it for animal feed (a wildly inefficient way to nourish people), blending it into biofuels for cars, or turning it into industrial products and ultra-processed food. To make matters worse, a third of all food is simply wasted.
Meanwhile, as the laureates remind us, shamefully, over 700 million people (9% of the world’s population) remain chronically undernourished, and a staggering 2.3 billion people – over one in four – cannot access an adequate diet.
Jennifer Clapp, who authored that IPES-Food statement, is Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security & Sustainability and Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. Her book– Titans of Industrial Agriculture –outlines the long history of corporate power and so explains how we got to where we are today. Raj Patel says the history Clapp uncovers in this book shows why we’ll need to undo the sins of the nineteenth century if we are all to survive in the twenty-first.
In today’s segment, we have been looking into how Brazil is off the UN Hunger Map, the harvest reaches the hungry. And this success, as Patel explains, was achieved through hunger policies implemented under the Lula government. And this success shows ending hunger is not rocket science. You can end hunger, if you choose these policies.
Here’s a quick run through of those policies as posted by Patel and Recine in their Brazil Beats Hunger commentary:
- Cash transfers to the most vulnerable families through the expansion of Bolsa Família.
- A universal school feeding programme, reaching all elementary and secondary school students with nutritious meals sourced from local and agroecological farmers – with expanded outreach to hospitals, military institutions and universities.
- An increase in the minimum wage.
- Public procurement from family farmers, including payments to small-scale and agroecological producers to supply schools and community kitchens.
- Support for farmers to transition to organic and agroecological production – helping to tackle climate change.
- Targeted support for black and Indigenous peoples to have access to public food purchases.
- Granting every Brazilian the human right to adequate food in national law.
- A Feeding Cities program, improving access to affordable food in urban areas by expanding local markets, public restaurants, and food banks.
- Unprecedented cross-government coordination – involving all ministries, all levels of government, and civil society – to align food, health, education, climate and poverty eradication goals.
As put by Raj Patel & Elisabetta Recine in Brazil Beats Hunger:
With global food insecurity high and UN hunger goals dangerously off track – amid conflict, climate shocks and a spiralling cost of living – the success of [Brazil Without Hunger] Brazil Sem Fome offers both a wake-up call and a roadmap. It was achieved not through techno-fixes or increases to yields, but people-first policies to guarantee food access.
These then are some key takeaways that go a long way towards explaining why IPES-Food experts – Raj Patel and Elisabetta Recine – conclude:
Brazil’s blueprint offers proof that a future free from hunger is not only possible but within reach. As hosts of COP 30 in Belém, Brazil now sends a timely signal to world leaders that tackling hunger, inequality and climate crisis together is achievable and replicable – if they make the political choice to do so.
We are going to leave it there. Special thanks to guest contributor, Raj Patel. And thank you for joining us.
Raj Patel is a research professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He is an IPES-Food panel expert among numerous other distinctions. A prolific author, his books include Stuffed and Starved, The Value of Nothing, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet and most recently Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
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