An open letter to Brazilian society in April 1993, followed by a Christmas food drive later that year, marked the birth of Ação da Cidadania, or Citizenship Action. The movement, which later became an NGO, was responsible for teaching Brazil that feeding its people was the fulfillment of a constitutional right that could only be achieved through public policy.
Until then, Brazilians had seen hunger as a minor problem to be solved through one-off charitable actions.
That year, Brazil’s Institute of Applied Economics (Ipea) found that 32 million people, or 20 percent of the population, could afford only one “basic food basket” — a selection of food staples — with their monthly income.
“It was unacceptable. That was the word that my father used when he saw the data and decided that he and his friends at the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis (Ibase) had to do something about it,” recalls Daniel Souza, the son of Ação da Cidadania’s founder, sociologist Herbert “Betinho” de Souza, and current head of the NGO’s board.
“It was Ação da Cidadania that ‘put hunger on the table’ of all Brazilians and politicians, who recognized the problem as something unacceptable,” emphasizes Rodrigo Afonso, the NGO’s executive director. Also known as “Kiko,” he is the son of Carlos Afonso, who co-founded the organization with Betinho and Marcos Arruda of Ibase.
“Years before, we had seen famous artists in the U.S. organize the Live Aid concerts to raise money for starving people in Africa, but famine was on our doorstep,” adds Mr. Afonso.
A movement is born
Never before had a cause rallied so many of Brazil’s most prominent figures, from politics to the arts. Networks from across the country, with massive support from private corporations, were organized into more than 5,000 committees in the years that followed, mobilizing tens of millions of volunteers.
A decade earlier, Betinho had been an important voice in the country’s agrarian reform crusade and was seen at the time as a proponent of the “ethics in politics” movement that had culminated in the impeachment of former President Fernando Collor de Mello a year earlier. Even before that, he had been an influential pro-democracy voice during the country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship and one of the activists allowed to return home under Brazil’s 1979 amnesty law.
So when Betinho decided to talk about hunger...
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