WORLD TEACHERS' DAY
Ontario activists find common thread with poverty in Brazil
October 1, 2009
Elvira Cordileone
STAFF REPORTER
As desperate visits to Toronto food banks shot up last year, a city of about the same size in southeastern Brazil was finding ways to fill the bellies of its schoolchildren.
In the city of Belo Horizonte, population 2.5 million, each public school student gets a hot, nutritious lunch for free every day.
And anybody else in the city can walk into one of four cafeteria-style restaurants and get a hot meal for very little money.
Although Belo Horizonte is much poorer than Toronto, it does a whole lot more about hunger with a lot less money than most North American cities.
The city's crusade against hunger started in 1993. Since then, Brazil's leftist government, elected in 2003, has broadened the fight across the nation, with actions ranging from expanding school meal programs to giving family-run farms markets for their produce and providing grants to 11 million of the country's poorest households.
The National Council for Food and Nutritional Security, a presidential advisory board made up of legislators and members of the public, wants to enshrine the right to an adequate diet in Brazil's constitution.
The results of Brazil's Zero Hunger program have yielded impressive outcomes, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute's 2008 Global Hunger Index report:
Between 1996 and 2006, chronic malnutrition in children under age 5 dropped to 7 per cent from 13 per cent. In the northeast, the poorest region, the malnutrition rate plunged to 5.9 per cent from 22.1 per cent.
During the same period, infant mortality dropped to 22 deaths per thousand live births from 39 deaths.
Brazil's success led the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation to Belo Horizonte when it chose food security as its latest Common Threads project – the fourth in a series of in-class teaching packages dealing with global issues. Previous topics dealt with the world's water supply, HIV/AIDS and sweatshops in the Third World.
The Hungry for Change package includes an integrated DVD and CD-ROM, lesson plans and assessment rubrics. Designed to mesh with Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum expectations, it can be used with a wide range of subjects, from civics or politics to family studies. The material is free to OSSTF members.
Four federation members travelled to Brazil in August 2008, along with Cecilia Rocha, director of Ryerson's Centre for Studies in Food Security. The teaching materials the group has developed will be launched Oct. 16, World Food Day.
Sadhana Hirdaramani, a world issues and geography teacher at Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough, made the trek to Belo Horizonte. She says the trip opened her eyes to how much we can learn from a developing country.
"In North America, we have this sense that we know so much. We have some amazing programs but (Brazil) has made a commitment to alleviating the poverty through food."
Rocha, who teaches in Ryerson's nutrition department, points out many countries feed children at school as a matter of policy. Canada does not.
Of course, you can't provide a hot lunch without kitchen facilities, and many Ontario elementary schools don't have them.
"Why would they (have kitchens)?" Rocha asks. "Given that it is not a policy, a lot of schools have been built without those facilities."
According to the first and most recent Canadian Community Health Survey conducted in 2004, Rocha says 9 per cent of Canadian households don't have "food security" – a broad term that includes everything from going hungry to eating a poor diet due to lack of money to buy nutritious food.
She says two things have to happen before we can reduce the number of hungry people in Canada: people must learn what food security means and governments must get involved.
The Hungry for Change package will help teachers bring this two-pronged discussion into the classroom.
"It's not just eating right," Rocha insists. "A lot of people know what that means. But how do you do that? What's the environment you should have that allows you to eat right?"
She adds the program aims to help students make sense of the many issues surrounding food, such as poverty, obesity and environmental concerns.
Then, having made sense of them, what steps can students take as individuals and as members of society?
More on World Teacher's Day.
For information about Hungry for Change, got to commonthreads.ca
Toronto Star