Students eating lunch at Shivbhawani Primary School, Deulekh, Bajhang, Nepal. Credit: Marty Logan

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Apr 4 2022 (IPS)

When Canada and Nepal are used in the same sentence it’s usually because the former is supporting development efforts in the latter. Not when it comes to feeding children at school.

Worldwide 388 million students, or 1 in 2 schoolchildren, received at least one meal or snack per day at school before the COVID-19 pandemic in what the World Food Programme (WFP), quoting the World Bank, calls the world’s “most extensive social safety net.”

When Covid-19 hit and schools shut their doors, roughly 370 million students in 161 countries went without education and a meal or snack, “suddenly deprived of what was for many their main meal of the day”

Nepal is in a unique position because it is poised to completely take over school feeding from the WFP, which still serves some remote areas of the South Asian country, by 2024. Canada is also being watched because it is just now taking steps to create a centrally-managed programme, the last G7 country to do so, to buttress current patchwork provincial initiatives.

Motivations for governments to launch school feeding programmes vary, but are not solely linked to socioeconomic status, says Donald Bundy, Professor of Epidemiology and Development and Director of the Global Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.

“Nearly all countries view the programmes as providing a safety net for the most in need,” writes Bundy in response to email questions. “Many view the programmes as contributing to the creation of good health and education, and thus human capital. A substantial group recognize the local economic value to the agricultural sector. A small but increasing number view the contribution to environmental sustainability as important.”

When Covid-19 hit and schools shut their doors, roughly 370 million students in 161 countries went without education and a meal or snack, “suddenly deprived of what was for many their main meal of the day” says WFP’s report State of School Feeding Worldwide, 2020.

In response, governments, development agencies, donors, academia, the private sector, UN agencies and civil society organizations launched the global School Meals Coalition. Its main goals are to restore by 2023 the school feeding programmes lost worldwide because of the pandemic and, by 2030, to launch new ones to feed the 73 million students globally who lacked school meals before Covid-19.

So far, 60+ countries have joined the coalition, including Nepal but not Canada. Its success will depend on the choices that governments make, says Bundy. “Since Covid has affected economies, there has been a contraction of fiscal space which makes getting back to the original situation more difficult… It would seem that countries are prioritizing this investment in their future generations, as indicated by the creation of the coalition, but this has yet to be seen in practice.”

Nepal demonstrated its commitment to school feeding before Covid-19. From 2017 to 2020 the school meals budget almost quadrupled (from $20 million to nearly $70 million), and external funding fell from $4.2 million to $2.8 million in 2020), according to the WFP report.

Lunch time at Janajagriti Basic School in Dhangadhi, Nepal. Credit: Marty Logan

Interestingly, there have been no evaluations in Nepal of the impact of school feeding on students’ nutritional status, says WFP. The country’s School Sector Development Plan (2016-2022) calls for “midday meals in schools to reduce short term hunger among schoolchildren, and address micronutrient deficiencies through multi-fortified foods and diversifying the food basket, including with fresh and locally produced foods.”

While Nepal has drastically cut malnutrition in children under five in recent decades, progress has slowed in the past few years. For example, the 36% rate for stunting (too short for age) in 2016 was greater than the developing country average of 25% and the Asia average of 21.8%.

Today the government’s diya khaja (midday meal) programme covers 71 of 77 districts and WFP is scheduled to hand over operations in the remaining districts (which are already co-funded by Kathmandu) by 2024.

While media reports highlight examples of problems, such as schools handing out dry food to students instead of cooking a hot meal and possible corruption in handling money, reactions at schools recently visited in Nepal’s Far West Province were mainly positive. Officials, teachers and parents stressed attendance had risen, and that pupils were remaining for the entire school day instead of leaving for lunch and staying at home.

Ten local food menus—based on seasonally available foods in particular regions and designed to meet nutritional targets—were credited for the change. “Students are more satisfied now because the meals change daily. With the WFP system there was only one item,” says Headmaster Dev Bahadur Chand at Nanigad Basic School in Baitadi District.

Chand was the only person we spoke to who was satisfied with the programme’s budget of 15 rupees (US$0.12) per meal per child (20 rupees in five remote districts). Others said that while the amount could cover food costs it didn’t leave enough to pay a cook or fuel and transport fees.

At the Nepal Government office that manages the burgeoning programme, the Centre for Education and Human Resources Development (CEHRD), Director Ganesh Poudel acknowledges that issue. “Each child is allotted only 15 rupees; this is the main challenge. This amount is very low—prices are increasing day by day and there are management costs. How can we survive? We have very limited resources,” he says in an interview in his office.

The other major challenge, says Poudel, is human resources. “Nearly one million people are involved in preparing and delivering the school meal programme, directly and indirectly. Some will cook, some will manage, some will pay… How can we prepare them? It requires a big amount of money and preparation.”

While WFP will no longer implement a school feeding programme from 2024, it will remain a partner in the effort, says Nepal Representative and Country Director Robert Kasca. Today, it’s working with the government to upgrade physical and human resources for school feeding in Nuwakot district, a two-hour drive from Kathmandu. Kitchens are being renovated, menus developed and an SMS-based system tested to monitor how the Rs15 allocation is spent.

“Our plan in the next five years will be to try to replicate it around the country,” says Kasca. “If we only do it in Nuwakot it’s not going to automatically happen around the country. We need to do it in many more places to start gaining momentum.”

Students at James S. Bell Community School in Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada where they have a salad bar style lunch programme, first developed in southern California. Credit: FoodShare/Laura Berman/Greenfuse Photography

In Canada, the issue is not launching more school meals programmes but getting the central government to play a guiding role, says Debbie Field, Coordinator of the Coalition for Healthy School Food. Why now? “Basically every country in the North comes up against a new crisis, which is the crisis of fast food and the crisis of health problems related to an industrialized food system,” says Field.

“First and foremost for me, it is a crisis of food and the way in which parents of all incomes are really struggling to feed their children healthy food.” Compared to 1948, when the federal cabinet last discussed school meals, “we have a vast difference of women’s participation rates in the workforce and a complete shift in our school day—most schools have a half hour a day for lunch,” adds Field.

In a written response to questions, Karina Gould, Canada’s Minister of Families Children and Social Development, wrote that the school food policy being developed would “provide access to healthy, diversified and balanced food as a matter of equity, which is essential to addressing food insecurity, reducing the risk of chronic disease and enabling every child to reach their full potential.”

Thirty-five percent of publicly-funded schools in Canada offered a programme in 2018-2019, covering 21 percent of students, from junior kindergarten to Grade 12, found a recent survey. But coverage varied immensely, with one province covering at least 90 percent of schools another just 10 percent.

Field says she is expecting the government to announce C$200 million in the upcoming budget to develop the framework for the eventual programme. But her coalition wants some of that money allocated to existing programmes in the provinces and territories. Eventually, says Field, the central government should provide $2.7 billion, or half the cost of a universal programme, with the provinces and territories contributing the rest.

“We want (the central government) to take a leadership oversight role and provide a federal framework that will allow for development of the best school food programme in the world. We want them to be visionary… and they’re responding well to this idea.”

This work was supported by a Global Nutrition and Food Security Reporting Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists and the Eleanor Crook Foundation.

FAO Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean Julio Berdegué visited the rural school in Pepenance, in western El Salvador, which has become a model in healthy eating, within El Salvador’s programme of sustainable schools. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
ATIQUIZAYA, El Salvador, Feb 5 2018 (IPS)

Eating healthy and nutritious food in schools in El Salvador is an effort that went from a pilot plan to a well-entrenched programme that has now taken off.

The Sustainable Schools programme, initially launched in 2013 in three schools in the rural municipality of Atiquizaya, in the western department of Ahuachapán, surpassed expectations and has now been replicated in all 22 schools in the municipality, and in many others in the country.

“With the 10 menus that we have implemented here, we have changed the student’s expectations about meals,” the director of the Pepenance District Educational Centre, José Antonio Tespan, told IPS before this year’s first parent-teacher assembly.

That institution is one of the three where the programme started, and over time became the flagship of the initiative."This gives us the opportunity to open new doors with other decision-makers to promote more integral projects... there are families who want a school garden, so we’re starting a project of family gardens in the municipality.” -- Ana Luisa Rodríguez

Now it has been implemented in 10 of El Salvador’s 14 departments, and includes 40 of the country’s 262 municipalities and 215 of the more than 3,000 schools in the rural area, benefiting some 73,000 students.

The project has had from the start technical support from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and financing from the Brazilian government. And although it officially ended in December 2017, it will continue because of its success.

“There was a paradigm shift and a sustainable school model was developed in Atiquizaya, it was a pleasure for FAO to have accompanied them,” the U.N. agency’s representative in El Salvador, Alan González, told IPS.

El Salvador is part of a group of 13 countries in the region that, since 2009, have taken part in an initiative executed by FAO and the Brazilian government, extending the programme of sustainable schools, adapting the achievements of that South American country’s National School Feeding Programme.

This Central American nation of 6.5 million people faces serious socioeconomic problems, and child malnutrition has never been eradicated.

Chronic malnutrition in El Salvador was around 14 percent in 2014, in children under five, according to that year’s National Health Survey, the most recent. That exceeds the Latin American average, which is 11.6 percent, according to 2015 data from the World Health Organisation.

The students benefiting from the initiative receive a mid-morning snack, made with products purchased from farmers in the area, as part of the “local purchases” component, a key aspect of the project.

Students of the Pepenance District School in the municipality of Atiquizaya, in western El Salvador, pose for pictures in front of one of the nutritious daily meals offered to the students, which are made with products from local farmers. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“In addition to ensuring a nutritious diet for our students, at the same time we are strengthening the local economy,” said Tespan, the director of the school in Pepenance, home to 3,225 of the 34,000 inhabitants of the 67-sq-km municipality of Atiquizaya, which encompasses 13 districts (villages or small towns).

The school’s cook, 46-year-old Rosa Delmy Fajardo, a native of Pepenance, mixes fruits, vegetables, and eggs with enthusiasm. Her meals have achieved the approval of the students.

She told IPS that of the 10 menus, there was one she had never seen or tasted, the so-called “Chinese rice”, based on that grain, to which is added an egg cake, cut into pieces.

“When I make that, they eat everything, and there are children who ask their mothers to make them Chinese rice,” she said.

She added that she has been in charge of the school kitchen for 11 years, but has worked three years under FAO nutritional guidelines.

Before that, the menu was less nutritious, since it only had staples such as oil, rice, beans, sugar and milk.

“Now we have everything that is needed for the food to have another touch,” Fajardo said.

The success achieved in Pepenance was reflected in November when it became a finalist for the Banco do Brasil Foundation Award, in the international category.

The award promotes low-cost sustainable development initiatives with a major social impact that involve community participation. The categories are aligned with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promoted by the UN’s 2030 Agenda.

“I am overjoyed about this award, for me it is a great achievement, and I feel proud,” added Fajardo.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Atiquizaya, Ana Luisa Rodríguez, said she felt happy and moved by the recognition obtained in Brazil, and hoped it would bring more benefits to strengthen the programme.

“This gives us the opportunity to open new doors with other decision-makers to promote more integral projects… there are families who want a school garden, so we’re starting a project of family gardens in the municipality,” she said in a conversation with IPS.

For the mayor, part of the key to the success obtained in Pepenance has been the work coordinated with all the actors and agencies that have been working towards the same end.

“Having achieved this intersectoral collaboration was momentous: the parents got involved in the construction of a storehouse, kitchen and dining room, and they were also empowered, they are part of the project,” she said.
For his part, the FAO’s González stressed that “in Atiquizaya the involvement by the community and local actors was vital” in achieving the result obtained.

In September 2017, FAO regional representative Julio Berdegué visited Pepenance for a first-hand view of the achievements obtained, and stressed that the small Salvadoran community’s accomplishments are an example to be replicated in other countries.

A farmer picks lettuce in Santa María de Jetibá, a hilly farming municipality that is the main supplier of agricultural products for school meals in the city of Vitoria, 90 km away along a winding highway. It is home to the largest Pomeranian community in Brazil and possibly in the world. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
VITORIA, Brazil, May 29 2017 (IPS)

“I am going back to Panama with many ideas,” said Gilda Montenegro, a nutritionist with the Panamanian Education Ministry, after getting to know the school feeding system in the city of Vitoria, in central-eastern Brazil.

She said she was impressed with how organised it is, the resources available to each school and “the role of played by nutritionists, in direct contact with the lunchrooms, training the cooks in hygiene and nutrition, educating everyone while fulfilling a key educational function.”

Montenegro and 22 other visitors from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean met with Brazilian representatives in the city of Vitoria, for a tour through schools and centres of production and distribution of food that supply the municipal schools.

The May 16-18 technical visit was organised by the Strengthening School Feeding Programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean programme implemented by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), as part of a cooperation agreement signed with the Brazilian government in 2008.“Families adopt our habits, even though we only eat dinner at home. Now we eat more vegetables at home. I used to be fat, but I lost weight doing sports and eating food with less calories, and today I have my health under control.” -- Marcos Rodrigues

The aim was a first-hand look at the implementation in Vitoria of the Brazilian National School Feeding Programme (PNAE), which has become a model replicated in a number of countries around the world. The programme serves 43 million students in public preschools and primary schools, which are municipal, and secondary schools, which are the responsibility of the states.

The PNAE was first launched in 1955. But the significant impact it has had in terms of food security, nutrition and social participation has been seen since a 2009 law established that at least 30 percent of the funds received by each school had to be devoted to buying food produced by local family farms.

“This decentralisation favours local producers and students gain in better-quality, fresh food at a lower cost. It promotes cooperatives and stimulates the local economy, through small-scale farming, while benefiting the environment by reducing transportation time,” said Najla Veloso, the regional project coordinator for FAO.

“In most of the municipalities, the suppliers are parents of the students,” which help forge closer ties between local families and the schools and improves the quality of the food. All of this constitutes an important help for keeping people in rural areas,” Veloso told IPS.

Students eat lunch in the Alberto Martinelli Municipal Preschool in the city of Vitoria. A good part of their food comes from local family farms, like in the rest of the public schools in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Buying local could rekindle the ancestral agricultural knowledge of the Ngäbe and Buglé people, who live in western Panama, said Montenegro. Since 1997, the two ethnic groups have shared an indigenous county with a population of about 155,000.

“They provide 80 per cent of the food for four schools, but they have not been able to expand, because of the system of purchases by tendering process, and are almost limited to producing for their own consumption,” lamented the Panamanian nutritionist. More school purchases could “rescue their traditional methods of harvesting and preserving their typical products,” she said.

The technical visits organised by FAO “show successful experiences for building knowledge in other countries, stimulating innovation,” said Veloso.

A new generation of school feeding programmes is emerging in the region, combining healthy nutrition, public purchases, family agriculture and social integration.

Vitoria, the capital of the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo, was chosen to receive technicians and authorities from 13 countries because of “its strong implementation of the PNAE, its organised team, and because it has been a pioneer in this area,” explained Veloso.

Before the new law went into effect in 2008, Vitoria already prioritised healthy food produced by small-scale local farmers, said Marcia Moreira Pinto, coordinator of the School Food and Nutrition Sector in the Municipal Secretariat of Education.

It also always surpassed the minimum proportion of purchases set for family agriculture, she said. In 2016, 34 per cent of the purchases were from small-scale farmers.

This aspect has only recently been recognised as key to food security.

Gilda Montenegro, a nutritionist with Panama’s Education Ministry who took part in a FAO-organised technical visit to get a first-hand look at the school feeding programme in Vitoria, Brazil, together with 22 other representatives of 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“This integration between education and family agriculture benefits society as a whole, it’s fantastic. I will try to do it in my town,” said Mario Chang, director of education in the department of San Marcos, Guatemala.

“The visit gave me new ideas,” said Rosa Cascante, director of Equality Programmes in Costa Rica’s Ministry of Public Education.

The challenge, she said, “will be to adapt Brazil’s local purchases system” to her country, where all supplies for public institutions go through the state National Production Council.

A campaign against the waste of food is an innovation created by students in the Eunice Pereira da Silveira Municipal Primary School. In 2015, the losses amounted to 50 kilos a week. This has been reduced to just seven or eight kilos, according to the school’s authorities.

Students are served three meals a day at the full-time school, whose 322 students attend from 7 am to 5 pm.

The campaign started with a few students under the guidance of teachers. They monitored the food wasted in the school kitchen, carried out surveys on nutrition, and talked with other students and the cooks to adapt the meals in order to make them tastier and reduce waste.

Besides cutting economic losses and boosting a healthier diet in schools, with more salads and lower fat, the campaign is helping to improve family habits, said 14-year-old Marcos Rodrigues, one of the campaign’s leaders.

The refrigerator of a public preschool and daycare centre in the city of Vitoria, full of locally-produced fruit and vegetables. In Brazil, the obligatory supply of at least 30 per cent of the food for school meals from family farms has improved nutrition among the students and has promoted local development. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“Families adopt our habits, even though we only eat dinner at home. Now we eat more vegetables at home. I used to be fat, but I lost weight doing sports and eating food with less calories, and today I have my health under control,” the teen-ager told IPS.

But it is “in the acceptance of healthy foods where we need more effort, in light of an international scenario of increasingly industrialised products which offer great convenience,” said Moreira Pinto.

Most of the fruits and vegetables served in schools in Vitoria come from Santa Maria de Jetibá, a hilly municipality 90 km away, populated by Pomeranians, a European ethnic group that used to occupy parts of Germany and Poland, who scattered at the end of World War II.

Pomeranian immigration to Brazil occurred mainly in the late 19th century, to Espírito Santo, where they maintained their rural customs and their language in a number of municipalities where there are big communities.

“Santa Maria is the most Pomeranian municipality in Brazil and perhaps in the world,” according to Mayor Hilario Roepke, due to both the number of inhabitants as well as the preservation of a culture that has disappeared or has changed a lot even in their native land.

“Of nearly 40,000 inhabitants, 72 per cent are still rural,” allowing the municipality to occupy first place in agricultural production in the state of Espírito Santo and eleventh in Brazil, and the second leading national producer of eggs: nine million a day, said the mayor.

The 220-member Cooperative of Family Farmers of the Serrana Region (CAF) is the biggest supplier of food to schools.

“The school feeding programme in Vitoria´s metropolitan region is our main market,” said Maicon Koehler, an agricultural technician for CAF. Greater Vitoria has a total population of nearly two million.
With 102 municipal schools, the city buys nearly 20 tons of meat and 6.3 tons of beans a month to feed its almost 500,000 students, estimated the coordinator of the sector, who explained that the amounts of fruits and vegetables vary, depending on the season.

Students at the “República de Venezuela” School in the indigenous Lenca village of Coloaca in western Honduras, where they have a vegetable garden to grow produce and at the same time learn about the importance of a healthy and nutritious diet. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
COALACA, Honduras, Jul 15 2016 (IPS)

Barely 11 years old and in the sixth grade of primary school, this student dreams of becoming a farmer in order to produce food so that the children in his community never have to go hungry. Josué Orlando Torres of the indigenous Lenca people lives in a remote corner of the west of Honduras.

He is part of a success story in this village of Coalaca, population 750, in the municipality of Las Flores in the department (province) of Lempira.

Five years ago a Sustainable School Feeding Programme (PAES) was launched in this area. It has improved local children’s nutritional status and enjoys plenty of local, governmental and international participation.

Torres is proud of his school, named for the Republic of Venezuela, where 107 students are supported by their three teachers in their work in a “teaching vegetable garden”. They grow peas and beans, fruit and vegetables that are used daily in their school meals.

Torres told IPS that he did not used to like green vegetables, but now “I’ve started to like them, and I love the fresh salads and green juices.”

Josué Orlando Torres, an 11-year-old student, dreams of becoming a farmer to ensure that children like himself have access to free high-quality food at this school in the indigenous community of Coloaca, where a sustainable school programme is beginning to overcome chronic malnutrition. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“Here they taught us what is good for us to eat, and also to plant produce so that there will always be food for us. We have a vegetable garden in which we all plant coriander, radishes, cucumbers, cassava (yucca), squash (pumpkin), mustard and cress, lettuce, carrots and other nutritious foods,” he said while indicating each plant in the school garden.

When he grows up, Torres does not want to be a doctor, engineer or fireman like other children of his age. He wants to be “a good farmer to grow food to help my community, help kids like me to be well-fed and not to fall asleep in class because they had not eaten and were ill,” as happened before, he said.

The 48 schools scattered throughout Las Flores municipality, together with other schools in Lempira province, especially those located within what is called the dry corridor of Honduras, characterised by poverty and the onslaughts of climate change, are part of a series of sustainable pilot projects being promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and PAES is one of these.

The purpose of these sustainable school projects is to improve the nutritional status of students and at the same time give direct support to small farmers, by means of a comprehensive approach and effective local-local, local-regional and central government-international aid  interactions.

As a result of this effort in indigenous Lenca communities and Ladino (mixed indigenous-white or mestizo) communities such as Coalaca, La Cañada, Belén and Lepaera (all of them in Lempira province), schoolchildren and teachers alike have said goodbye to fizzy drinks and sweets, and undertaken a radical change in their food habits.

Parents, teachers, students, each community and municipal government, three national Secretariats (Ministries) and FAO have joined forces so that these remote Honduran regions may see off the problems of famine and malnutrition that once were rife here.

A family production chain was developed to supply the schools with food for their students, who average over 100 at each educational centre, complementing the school vegetable gardens.

Every Monday, small farmers bring their produce to a central distribution centre, and municipal vehicles distribute it to the schools.

View of Belén, a town that is the head of a rural municipality of the same name amid the mountains of western Honduras, in the department (province) of Lempira, where a programme rooted in local schools is improving nutrition among remote indigenous communities. Credit: Courtesy of Thelma Mejía

Erlín Omar Perdomo, from the village of La Cañada in Belén municipality, told IPS: “When FAO first started to organise us we never thought things would go as far as they did, our initial concern was to stave off the hunger there was around here and help our children to be better nourished.”

“But as the project developed, they trained us to become food providers as well. Today this community is supplying 13 schools in Belén with fresh, high-quality produce,” the community leader said with satisfaction.

They organised themselves as savings micro-cooperatives to which members pay small subscriptions and which finance projects or businesses at lowinterest rates and without the need for collateral, as required by banks, or for payment of abusive interest rates, as charged by intermediaries known as “coyotes”.

“We never dreamed the project would reach the size it is today. FAO sent us to Brazil to see for ourselves how food was being supplied to schools by the families of students, but, here we are and this is our story,” said the 36-year-old Perdomo.

“We all participate, we generate income and bring development to our communities, to the extent that now the drop-out rate is practically nil, and our women have also joined the project. They organise themselves in groups to attend the school every week to cook our children’s food,” he said.

Rubenia Cortes, a mother and volunteer cook at the school in the remote village of La Cañada in the department (province) of Lempira, in western Honduras. They cook in a kitchen that was built by parents and teachers at the school. Credit: Courtesy of Thelma Mejía

A 2012 report by the World Food Programmme (WFP) indicated that in Central America, Honduras had the second worst child malnutrition levels, after Guatemala. According to the WFP, one in four children suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the worst problems seen in the south and west of the country.

But in Coalaca, La Cañada and other nearby villages and small towns, the situation has begun to be reverted in the past five years. The FAO project is based on the creation of a new nutritional culture; an expert advises and educates local families in eating a healthy and balanced diet.

“We don’t put salt and pepper on our food any more. We have replaced them with aromatic herbs. FAO trained us, teaching us what nutrients were to be found in each vegetable, fruit or pulse, and in what quantities,” said Rubenia Cortes.

“Look, our children now have beautiful skin, not dull like before,” she explained proudly to IPS. Cortes is a cook at the Claudio Barrera school in La Cañada, population 700, part of Belén municipality where there are 32 PAES centres.

Cortes and the other women are all heads of households who do voluntary work to prepare food at the school. “Before, we would sell our oranges and buy fizzy drinks or sweets, but now we do not; it is better to make orange juice for all of us to drink,” she said as an example.

From Monday to Friday, students at the PAES schools have a highly nutritious meal which they eat mid-morning.

The change is remarkable, according to Edwin Cortes, the head teacher of the La Cañada school. “The children no longer fall asleep in class. I used to ask them, ‘Did you understand the lesson?’ But what could they answer? They had come to school on an empty stomach. How could they learn anything?” he exclaimed.

In the view of María Julia Cárdenas, the FAO representative in Honduras, the most valuable thing about this project is that “we can leave the project, but it will not die, because everyone has appropriated it.”

“It is highly sustainable, and models like this one overcome frontiers and barriers, because everyone is united in a common purpose, that of feeding the children,” she told IPS after giving a delegation of experts and Central American Parliamentarians a guided tour of the untold stories that arise in this part of the dry corridor of Honduras.

There are 1.4 million children in primary and basic secondary schooling in Honduras, out of a total population of 8.7 million people. Seven ethnic groups live alongside each other in the country, of which the largest is the Lenca people, a group of just over 400,000 people.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/ Translated by Valerie Dee

A student at the Unidad Educativa La Paz school drinks fruit juice from a package distributed by the municipal government’s Complementary School Food Unit, which delivers 26 tons of natural products based on traditional grains and other ingredients to some 140,000 students. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Mar 7 2015 (IPS)

A successful school meals programme that serves breakfast and lunch with Andean flavours to 140,000 students in La Paz gave rise to a new law aimed at promoting healthy diets based on local traditions and products in Bolivia’s schools, while combating malnutrition and bolstering food sovereignty.

“We want fruit on Wednesdays!” shouted the students in a classroom in the Unidad Educativa La Paz school, when IPS asked for their suggestions to improve the meals they receive as part of the Complementary School Food Unit (ACE), a national programme.

A demand like this for healthy food, coming from youngsters, would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The model for ACE was a school breakfast that began to be served in 2000 in this city, the seat of government of Bolivia, and grew into an innovative meals programme based on nutritious locally-grown natural food for children and adolescents studying in the public schools in the biggest of this country’s 327 municipalities.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other international institutions have praised the result of the initiative in various reports.Every day, from dawn to dusk, some 26 tons of food and beverages are distributed from production centres located in Bolivia’s highlands, more than 4,000 metres above sea leavel, or in the valleys and tropical areas of the department of La Paz. The school meals programme has thus bolstered both employment and trade.

“We are leaders in producing school meals with Andean foods like amaranth, fava bean flour and quinoa,” the city government’s director of education Jorge Gómez told IPS with evident enthusiasm, in the austere office where he coordinates the meal plan for public school students between the ages of five and 15.

The high-protein amaranth and quinoa grains formed the foundation of the diet of the pre-Columbian cultures of South America’s Andean region.

Among the positive results: In the first eight years of the programme, anemia fell 30 percent among public school students in the municipality, according to independent studies by the Mayor de San Andrés University and the international organisation Save the Children.

ACE, which was established in the primary and secondary public school system nationwide in 2005, is run by special municipal units. In 2013 it reached two million students in this country, according to the Education Ministry, which is responsible for the programme.

The initiative not only improved the eating habits of students, but gave a boost to small-scale community agriculture.

In addition, it gave rise to the “law on school meals in the framework of food sovereignty and a plural economy” which went into effect on the last day of 2014, banning transgenic and packaged foods in schools and stipulating that they be replaced by traditional Andean foods, most of which are locally produced, starting this year.

Professionals with the city government’s Complementary School Food Unit show the uniform to be worn by the students trained as “leaders in school nutrition and health” in the city’s schools. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

The La Paz model

Gómez explained that he talks to fathers and mothers to improve the family diet, and that a variety of products are included in the meals and snacks distributed in the 389 schools in La Paz run by the central and municipal governments, in the morning, afternoon and evening shifts.

La Paz, which covers 2,000 sq km, is home to 764,617 of the country’s 10 million people. Of that total, 293,000 are poor, with incomes of less than 90 dollars a month, according to official figures from 2013.

As they eat snacks and drink natural fruit juice from colourful packages, the students in the school visited by IPS say the chocolate-covered granola bars are their favourites.

The bars, made with cacao from the semi-tropical northwestern department of La Paz, are highly popular, and the day of the week they are included in the snack there is not enough for everyone because some students take several portions, the school principal, Marcela Fernández, told IPS.

The school meals provide one-fourth of the daily nutrients needed by a child or adolescent, and include milk, yoghurt, fruit juice and chocolate, to which iron, folic acid, and vitamins A, B and C are added.

The school meals also help families cut costs. “It’s a big help for the family budget,” the president of the Unidad Educativa La Paz school board, Fernando Aliaga, told IPS.

The school’s gym teacher, Hugo Quito, said the students have more energy now, because of the healthy meals.

The meals are the result of innovative and creative production and planning using products with Andean flavours, such as corn bread and buns made with other native grains, baked with eggs, oats and almonds, and steam-cooked quinoa biscuits called“k’ispiña”.

The biscuits revive an Andean tradition of old, when they were used as non-perishable food on long treks or during periods when food was scarce.

Each combination of ingredients was created by the city’s nutritionists, who are focused on reducing anemia among students. But the task is not always easy. One example was an “empanada” – a stuffed bread or pastry – with a filling of chard, which a group of parents complained about because they thought the green colour of the leafy vegetables was from mold.

A boost to agriculture

The boom in demand for natural foods also had a positive side effect, triggering a productive revolution of Andean grains, bananas and other fruits, which are now being produced in an organised manner by farmers grouped in companies and cooperatives.

Every day, from dawn to dusk, some 26 tons of food and beverages are distributed from production centres located in Bolivia’s highlands, more than 4,000 metres above sea leavel, or in the valleys and tropical areas of the department of La Paz. The school meals programme has thus bolstered both employment and trade.

The positive impacts on the health of schoolchildren and the revival of natural, Andean foods, along with the boost to community agriculture, served as a guide for the national law when it came to drawing up the new guidelines for ACE, for the meals distributed in public primary and secondary schools.

The new law is also in line with objectives set out by the government of President Evo Morales, in office since 2006, which promotes the integral concept of “Vivir Bien” – roughly “living well” – as the crux of its social policies.

The law is aimed at keeping children in school, fomenting agricultural production by giving top priority to locally produced ingredients, guaranteeing natural food products that are close to the local culture, and promoting community farming.

Meanwhile, the Complementary School Food Unit of La Paz has entered another pioneering phase: training leaders in nutrition, with the participation of teachers, parents and students, who are given uniforms and caps after undergoing training.

These leaders help raise awareness on healthy eating habits, nutrition and prevention of health problems in their schools and among the broader community. “We are promoting change, at the level of families and schools,” one of the technical experts in charge of the programme, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 20 2013 (IPS)

Providing school meals for 45 million children is a remarkable achievement for Brazil. But the programme faces specific difficulties, as well as the generic problems plaguing any national plan in this vast country of more than 192 million people.

Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme (PNAE) has evolved from the strictly welfare-oriented approach it had when it was created 58 years ago, into a multi-purpose development strategy with educational goals and a focus on stimulating local economies. IPS sat down with its coordinator, Albaneide Peixinho, to discuss its accomplishments and challenges.

Q: The PNAE has existed since 1955. How has it progressed since then?

A: Nowadays it is based on several principles, like the human right to adequate nutrition and the aim of ensuring food and nutritional security by means of free and universal provision for all children and adolescents enrolled in the public education system.

Albaneide Peixinho, coordinator of Brazil’s National School Meals Programme.
Credit: Divulgaçao Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Educaçao

And also on equity and the constitutional right to school meals as a way of guaranteeing equal access to food.

The PNAE is part of the federal government’s Zero Hunger strategy, which encompasses 30 programmes designed to fight the causes of hunger and contribute to eradicating extreme poverty.

The government’s social vision was a key factor in the dramatic fall in poverty in this country, and it was reflected in the PNAE, which since 2003 saw its funding increased by 300 percent and its services expanded to middle-school students.

At the same time, the requirement that the programme must purchase produce from local family farms gives it an important role in reducing social inequality.

Q: What has it achieved?

A: The PNAE was created simply as assistance to some schoolchildren. Now it reaches 45 million students in basic education for the 200 days of the school year. Over the years it has accumulated experience and has taken on an ever wider scope, promoting improvement in educational indicators, economic and social development and social participation in health care, by teaching good eating habits.

The 1988 constitution guaranteed the right (to free school meals) of all pupils enrolled in primary schools. As of 1994, the programme which previously was centralised, with a governing body that drew up menus, bought food and distributed it throughout the country, was converted into a locally managed programme governed by means of agreements.

Since 1998 it has been further improved, for example by insisting on respect for the eating habits and the farming preferences of each locality, and the creation of school nutrition councils as oversight bodies, with representatives of parents, students, teachers, the community and the executive and legislative branches.

One of the main legal frameworks is law 11,947 of 2009, which stipulates that at least 30 percent of the resources of the National Education Development Fund be devoted to buying food produced on family farms, as well as providing the school meal service to all primary education students, including both children and adults.

Q: What problems does the programme face?

A: There are difficulties that are specific to the programme, and others that are inherent to any programme covering the whole of Brazil: the size of the country, the varied agricultural activities in the different regions, and the low productive capacity of family agriculture when it comes to supplying demand.

Other problems include differences in local customs, the different nutritional needs of students, lack of infrastructure to store, transport and prepare meals, a lack of space to set up school lunchrooms, as well as challenges in developing ongoing food and nutritional education that is intrinsic to the educational process.

There is also “competition” between the meals offered by the school and canteens or bars selling sweets, fizzy drinks, salty or fatty snacks, the “favourites” of children and adolescents. A 2009 resolution restricts the amount of fat, sugar and salt in PNAE meals.

Q: And what challenges does the programme intend to address?

A: We plan to carry out a thorough assessment of the nutritional needs of students and match them with adequate nutrition that they find acceptable, as well as with the farming culture and diets of every locality. Another challenge is finding professionals who are well-trained in this field.

Q: Is it possible to reach all primary schools, at federal, state and municipal levels?

A: The programme serves all schools that have formed their own school nutrition council and have hired a nutritionist. In 2012 there were 161,670 such schools, 83 percent of the total.

Q: How are the menus drawn up?

A: They need to be drawn up according to age range, type of school and the hours students spend in school. When two meals are served, at least 30 percent of daily nutritional requirements should be provided. In schools with a full-day curriculum, the minimum is 70 percent. (In Brazil, many schoolchildren attend either the morning or the afternoon shift.)

Q: Has it been demonstrated that school meals improve scholastic performance?

A: There is a variety of evidence on the role of nutrition in neurological, cognitive and intellectual development in childhood. Proteins, calcium, iron, iodine, zinc, vitamins and fish oils fulfil essential functions, as shown by different studies.

The school environment favours the formation of habits. Habits are formed from birth, by means of family customs and those taught by society – at school, in social circles and by the media – up until adult life, when along with symbolic aspects they set the pattern of individual and societal consumption.

The PNAE encourages eating fruits, vegetables and pulses and prescribes food hygiene control, precepts that lead to an adequate supply and healthy intake. The earlier these habits are learned, the greater the probability that they will be continued in adulthood.

Excerpt:

Students in the Nilo Peçanha school lunchroom. Credit: Still image from video filmed by Vincent Rimbaux/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
PARACAMBÍ, Brazil, Mar 12 2013 (IPS)

Separating Maria Gomes Morais’ farm and a school in Rio de Janeiro are fields, hills and dirt roads that are impassable when it rains. But a school meal programme has forged a path linking the fresh produce harvested by small farmers like her with the need to provide nourishment to 45 million schoolchildren around Brazil.

Sabugo is only 60 km from the city of Rio de Janeiro. But the small rural town, where cars, bicycles and carts pulled by tired horses share the roads, feels as if it were a world away.

The arid landscape shifts subtly to different shades of green, survivors of the tropical
Mata Atlântica forest, as you wind your way through wild banana plants and bamboo groves to reach the Sítio Recanto da Alegria (Corner of Happiness) – Gomez Morais’s farm.

The 61-year-old Morais, who is known as “Neta”, has worked since the age of 10 on the three hectares farmed since her family occupied part of an old estate. She was later granted legal title to the property, as part of a government land reform process.

“I’ve never been afraid,” she tells IPS. “I go everywhere, I climb up and down the hills. I’m not scared of snakes or things like that. It’s as if they fled from me.”

“The big farmers have their machines. Ours are our hands,” she adds with a laugh, saying she would not trade her life in the countryside “for anything in the world.”

Her only support comes from a neighbour who helps her clear her land, where she grows okra, scarlet eggplant, and fruit like lemons, oranges, limes and maracuyá. Nature provides her with different varieties of native-grown bananas.

In the past, she sold to middlemen, and had to wait a long time to be paid.

“What did we eat? I’m not ashamed to say it: angú (cornmeal or plantain mush). Today’s meal programmes didn’t exist. You would wait for the middleman to come and make his monthly purchase. And in the meantime, your shelves would get empty and the kids would go hungry,” says Neta, whose three children are now grown up.

School lunches to the rescue

But through a Rio de Janeiro state cooperative, Unacoop, Neta became a supplier of Brazil’s National School Meals Programme (PNAE), which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme has taken as a model to replicate in other countries.

The PNAE was linked to family agriculture in 2009 through a law that establishes that 30 percent of the food served in school meals must be bought from family farmers in the same local area as the school.

Family farmers account for 10 percent of Brazil’s GDP.

The PNAE has two aims: to guarantee meals for school-age children and teenagers while improving the lives of 4.3 million small farmers like Neta.

“The good thing is that the prices they paid us have improved,” she says. Her home, which used to be adobe, now has several brick walls covered with plaster. And she has brought a refrigerator, stove and washing machine – which she is able to use because she also has electricity now.

The PNAE gives priority to rural settlements created by the land reform process, indigenous communities and quilombos, black communities that were founded by escaped or freed slaves.

A truck, or a tractor when it rains, picks up her fruit and vegetables and takes them to the local market. From there they are transported to the state of Rio de Janeiro agricultural supply centre, CEASA. They eventually end up at one of the more than 161,000 public schools included in the national meals programme, 83 percent of the total.

Neta supplies the programme with bananas, oranges, avocados, pineapples, cashews and cherries. “Everything has to be top quality for the school lunch programme,” she says.

Breaking the cycle of poverty

The PNAE has a long history. Born in 1955 as a welfare plan that targeted poor children, it was decentralised in the 1990s and its administration incorporated representatives of families, local communities, teachers, and the executive and legislative branches, the programme’s national coordinator, Albaneide Peixinho, tells IPS.

The programme was expanded by the governments of left-wing presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and his successor Dilma Rousseff.

Since 2003, the PNAE’s budget has grown 300 percent, and it was enlarged to include middle-school students and adults taking literacy courses, Peixinho adds.

The CEASA is a beehive of trucks unloading merchandise in the wee hours of the morning. The products sold by Neta and the rest of the members of the cooperative go to a special section for small farmers.

In the CEASA, a rural extension service for family farmers provides advice on planning and diversification of crops.

“The small farmer does not yet have the training to plan production and delivery times,” the head of the area, Newton Novo, tells IPS. “For a school lunch, I can’t send a green banana like I could to a big market which supplies neighbourhood markets. It has to be ripe and ready for consumption.”

But the technical aid is insufficient. “They should go out to the fields, in order to analyse the soils and see what is best to plant on each farm,” the coordinator of Unacoop, Margarete Teixeira, remarks to IPS.

Nor is it easy to become a PNAE supplier, because the programme requires land titles to be in order – a challenge in a country like Brazil, where rural land ownership problems date back to colonial times.

Eating our veggies

But an expert on food law, Leonardo Ribas, underscores the results of the programme, saying it has strengthened local economies and family agriculture, which are key “in a society where, because of agribusiness, food has become merchandise.

“It has also improved the diets of children, because they have begun to eat locally-produced foods that are grown organically,” he tells IPS.

The cafeteria in the public school in the municipality of Nilo Peçanha, which serves children from poor neighbourhoods like the Mangueira favela, serves breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks to 500 students.

The menus are planned on the basis of “nutritional standards for healthy foods, taking into account the age of the students, how many hours they spend in school, the harvest season for each product, the cost, and the eating habits of the students,” says the director of the Municipal Health Secretariat’s Nutrition Institute, Fátima França.

The school principal, Márcia Alves, says that while children tend to dislike vegetables, science classes help encourage consumption by teaching youngsters about their nutritional value.

The kids seem to have learned the lesson – at least, while the principal is standing nearby.

“I used to eat a lot of fast food, but now I eat a balanced diet, said 12-year-old Mariana Cristina.

“I used to eat more sweets than proper food, but in school, that’s changed,” says Elisangela, of the same age.

While the children are eating their vegetables in school, Neta is changing her clothes and heading into town to press for the purchase of a fruit ripening chamber and better organisation of the deliveries of local farmers, in order to improve the logistics of the local market, which would boost their incomes.

“I’m happy,” says Neta. “We’re helping to fight the hunger not only of the children, but of everyone.”

* With reporting by Fabíola Ortiz in Río de Janeiro.