Food Banks and Food Insecurity: Cases of Brazil and Turkey

Abstract

The ascendency of global neoliberal economic policies seriously challenged universalist and right-based welfare policies and promoted the idea of targeted and selective allocations to the poor with private provision for the better of in both high-income and developing countries since the mid-1980s. This article focuses on food banking as an example of targeted social provisioning and provides contrasting observations from food bank programs in Brazil and Turkey. The article traces some different approaches and practices of food banks, and argues that food banks could be part of the progressive social policies that address the root causes of hunger among developing countries within neoliberal economic restructuring.

Keywords:

• social policies
• food banking
• food insecurity
• neoliberalism
• poverty

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Food banking programmes are not only limited to developing countries. It is estimated that almost 60 million people benefit from food banks annually in high-income countries (Gentilini, 2013).

2 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva President of the Republic Inauguration Speech, 1 January 2003.

3 http://www.fomezero.gov.br (Rocha, 2009, p.52).

4 http://www.ipc-undp.org/pub/IPCTechnicalPaper7.pdf.

5 http://www.sectordialogues.org/news/brazil-and-the-european-union-raise-awareness-aboutfood-waste.

6 In Brazil, household food insecurity is measured by the Brazilian Household Food Insecurity Measurement Scale (EBIA) which focuses on assessing socio-economic access to foods.

7 The drop in severe food insecurity was observed across all Brazilian regions and states. However, the heterogeneous nature of this reduction needs to be pointed out. While the Midwest region experienced 54.0 per cent of severe food insecurity reduction, this ratio was 43.2 per cent in the North (Gubert et al., 2017, p.1).

8 A further legal revision expanded donations to include cleaning materials, clothing and fuel substances, and donations given to food banking associations were not only limited to food items.

9 In November 2002, the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey by receiving 34.6 per cent of the votes and 366 of the seats in the National Assembly. By the next three consecutive elections in 2007, 2011 and 2015, the AKP continued to remain the strongest party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evrim Görmüş

Evrim Görmüş received her BA in Political Science from Istanbul Bilgi University (2002). She holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford and a doctoral degree in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle (2014). Her doctoral dissertation is focused on the state and Islamic business relations in Turkey and Egypt. After having finished her PhD studies, Dr Görmüş held a TUBITAK Repatriation Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at Istanbul Bilgi University from October 2014 to April 2016. Her post-doc research project examines the impact of the neoliberal economic development model on the redefinition of the social contract between the state and society in Egypt and Tunisia. Dr Görmüş has been a visiting post-doctoral fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Summer 2016. She previously taught courses at University of Washington, Seattle, Istanbul Bilgi University and Boğaziçi University. Her research interests include Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, Comparative Politics, Political Islam, State–Society Relations.