Socioeconomic impacts of the National School Feeding Program on family farming in Santa Catarina

Abstract

The Brazilian School Feeding Program, responsible to provide all Brazilian public schools, started to have the obligation by law to designate at least 30% of the federal resource with family farmer products in 2009. The objectives of the law are generating higher quality of school feeding and strengthening family farmers. These objectives are being achieved, but are still far from its potential. In this context, the paper intends to identify weaknesses and propose adequacies in the PNAE taking into account the aspects of the operationalization and socioeconomic effects of public policy. The paper object is the state of Santa Catarina. The analysis is divided in two parts. The first one is an evaluation of the operationalization and the effects of the policy in 31 municipalities through interviews with farmers, responsible for implementing the PNAE and rural extension agents involved with the PNAE. The second one is a socio-economic analysis from an inter-regional input-output model about the effect of the school food shopping. The results show good evidence that market policies, such as PNAE, are a way of promoting rural development since they are constantly restructured to contemplate size, heterogeneity and scattering distribution of family farming.