Last week, I wrote about how political shifts can threaten public health policies.
This week, I’m sharing a guest post that vividly illustrates the potential impacts of Brazil’s elections next month on both hunger and nutritional outcomes.
It’s written by Thalita of O Joio e O Trigo (meaning “The Chaff and The Wheat”), an independent news outlet focused on food systems. They do great work and they were one of our two Brazilian media partners for the Big Food vs. The People investigation.
Given their expertise, I wanted their insights on what the upcoming elections mean for food systems governance. They also have a great English language newsletter which is worth subscribing to.
She argued that while Brazil’s exit from the Hunger Map is worth celebrating, it masks harder questions about power, policies, and democratic values.
Thalita Pires is the editor at O Joio e O Trigo.
Brazil’s 2026 presidential campaign officially began only a few weeks ago, but the fight over food has been under way for much longer. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is seeking a fourth term with one of his third administration’s clearest achievements at the centre of his campaign: Brazil’s removal from the United Nations Hunger Map.
On the other side, far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro — a senator and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro — has turned supermarket prices into a recurring argument against the government.
In August, Flávio shared a viral video in which a woman claimed to have spent 626 reais — around US$115 — on basic groceries without buying any meat. The receipt told a different story: the bill included more than six kilograms of meat.
The video was misleading, but the anxiety it exploited is real. Even as Brazil’s hunger indicators have improved sharply, many families still experience the cost of food as daily evidence that the economy is failing them.
Hunger, food prices and access to a healthy diet are closely connected, but they are not measured in the same way — and they cannot be addressed by the same set of policies. A country can reduce chronic undernourishment while millions of families still struggle with grocery bills or rely increasingly on cheap ultra-processed products. This is precisely the tension now shaping Brazil’s election.
At O Joio e O Trigo, we have spent the past decade investigating the forces that shape what Brazil produces and eats — from public policies against hunger to the corporate interests behind the country’s food system. If you would like to follow this story beyond the election, you can subscribe to our English-language newsletter.
Brazil offers a particularly stark case. It is one of the world’s largest agricultural producers and exporters. It has also built one of the most internationally recognised systems of public policy against hunger.
How Brazil Beat Hunger, Part I
Over the past two decades, the country has shown how quickly government action can improve access to food, and how quickly those gains can be reversed when the institutions behind them are weakened or dismantled. What it has not done is substantially redistribute power within the food system that determines what the country produces, exports, sells and eats.
Brazil’s first removal from the Hunger Map, in 2014, was not the result of a single flagship programme. It came from an architecture built over more than a decade.
Cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme for low-income families increased the purchasing power of the poorest households.
Real increases in the minimum wage and rising employment expanded incomes.
Public procurement programmes bought food directly from family farmers and supplied schools, community kitchens and social assistance networks.
The national school meals programme reached millions of children and required part of its budget to be spent on produce from family farming.
Just as important was the institutional framework connecting these policies.
The National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, known as Consea, brought civil society into government decision-making. Ministries that would otherwise have treated income, agriculture, health and education as separate issues were required to work around a shared objective. In 2010, the right to food was written into Brazil’s Constitution.
None of these measures was revolutionary on its own. Together, however, they rejected a persistent fiction: that hunger in an agricultural powerhouse was caused by a shortage of food. Brazil produces more than enough. The central problem has always been whether people have the income, public services and political power required to access it.
The same experience also showed that progress against hunger is easier to reverse than the indicators suggest.
After 2014, Brazil entered a period of economic recession, political crisis, and fiscal austerity. Funding for food procurement and other social programmes fell, while unemployment and poverty rose. The public architecture remained on paper, but many of its parts were gradually deprived of money and political priority.
The Bolsonaro Years
Jair Bolsonaro accelerated that dismantling. On his first day in office in 2019, he abolished Consea, removing one of the main channels through which civil society had influenced national food policy. Programmes supporting family farming and public food procurement were weakened.
Cash transfers, however, were not abolished. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress raised the proposed emergency payment from 200 to 600 reais. The benefit reached tens of millions of people and prevented an even deeper social crisis. Bolsonaro later replaced Bolsa Família with Auxílio Brasil and increased its value.
The pandemic destroyed jobs and livelihoods, while food inflation eroded the value of the benefits families received. School closures interrupted access to meals, and the weakening of food procurement, family farming policies, and mechanisms for coordination reduced the government’s capacity to respond.
By 2022, Brazil was back on the UN Hunger Map. The lesson was not that cash transfers had failed. It was that income support alone could not replace an entire food security system.
How Brazil Beat Hunger, Part II
When Lula returned to office in 2023, his government did not have to invent a new model. It restored much of the one that had been dismantled.
Consea was reinstated. Bolsa Família and the Food Acquisition Programme were relaunched. The government created the Brazil Without Hunger plan, increased the minimum wage above inflation and benefited from falling unemployment.
Food insecurity declined rapidly. In 2025, the FAO confirmed that the prevalence of undernourishment had again fallen below 2.5% of the population, the threshold used for the Hunger Map. The improvement was sustained in the following year.
The contrast is difficult to dismiss.
Brazil did not return to the Hunger Map because it had stopped producing enough food, nor did it leave again because agricultural output suddenly expanded. In both directions, political choices mattered: whether income was redistributed, whether public institutions functioned and whether hunger was treated as a government priority.
But restoration is not the same as transformation. Lula rebuilt important protections against hunger without substantially changing the system that makes access to food so unequal and vulnerable in the first place.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Leaving the Hunger Map does not mean that hunger has disappeared.
The FAO indicator estimates the share of the population whose habitual food consumption does not provide enough dietary energy. Falling below 2.5% is a significant achievement, but the measure does not capture every family skipping meals, compromising food quality, or struggling to afford groceries.
It is also calculated as a three-year average, which makes it useful for identifying trends but less sensitive to sudden changes.
Other indicators offer a less celebratory, though not contradictory, picture. In 2024, 24.2% of Brazilian households still experienced some degree of food insecurity, according to the national statistics agency. In 3.2%, the situation was severe: adults and children were cutting back on how much they eat.
These figures were substantially better than the previous year, but they show the distance between leaving an international map and guaranteeing the right to food for everyone.
There is another gap between having enough calories and being able to maintain a healthy diet. Families respond to rising prices by changing what they buy long before they begin skipping meals: reduce the variety of fresh food, replace products, choose cheaper sources of calories and devote a growing share of their income to eating.
Ultra-processed products, produced at enormous scale and favoured by parts of Brazil’s tax system, often compete on price with fresh and minimally processed food. Hunger can fall while poor diets and diet-related diseases continue to spread.
To be fair, the policies rebuilt by Lula address parts of this problem.
School meals, public procurement and support for family farming can connect access to food with the production of healthier diets. But their budgets remain vulnerable.
The Food Acquisition Programme, for example, was relaunched, reached record levels and then began to shrink again as funding tightened. Meanwhile, the agricultural policies commanding the largest volumes of public credit and infrastructure continue to prioritise commodity chains geared towards exports.
Climate change adds another layer of instability. Droughts, floods and extreme heat affect the production and price of staples, fruit and vegetables, while the farmers who supply domestic markets often have fewer resources to adapt. Income support can protect families from part of the shock, but it cannot by itself decide what is planted, how food reaches cities or which producers survive the next harvest.
This is the limit of Lula’s strongest electoral claim. Leaving the Hunger Map proves that public policy works. It does not prove that Brazil has built a food system capable of making those gains permanent.
Food, Democracy, and Corporate Power
The 2026 election is therefore not simply a contest between two approaches to food policy. It is taking place in the aftermath of an attempted coup and under pressure from a foreign government that has openly aligned itself with the Bolsonaro family.
In 2025, Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods and sanctioned Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, explicitly linking the measures to what he called the political persecution of Jair Bolsonaro. The former president was later sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting to overturn the result of the 2022 election.
His son Eduardo Bolsonaro moved to the United States to lobby the Trump administration on his father’s behalf; in June 2026, Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted him of seeking US interference.
Flávio Bolsonaro has tried to present himself as a more institutionally acceptable version of his father. But he remains a Trump ally and the candidate of a political movement that refused to accept its electoral defeat. Trump met Flávio and Eduardo in Washington as Brazil prepared for the new election, prompting Lula to tell the US president to “stay out” of Brazilian politics.
This places Lula at the centre of a much broader democratic coalition than his own party or the Brazilian left. The choice is not between two governments that made different technical decisions about social programmes.
It is also between a government that accepts elections, public participation and constitutional institutions, and a political project still connected to attempts to overturn an election, now with support from the White House.
Democracy is not a detour from the question of hunger.
Brazil’s food security system depends on institutions through which civil society can influence the government, monitor public spending, and treat food as a right rather than charity. Bolsonaro’s decision to abolish Consea the council was a decision both on food policy and about who should be allowed to participate in government.
Lessons From Brazil
Yet defending democracy does not settle every conflict over food.
The coalition around Lula includes social movements, trade unions and organisations fighting hunger, but it also accommodates one of the world’s most powerful agribusiness sectors.
His government restored policies that help poor families and family farmers while preserving an agricultural model built around concentrated land ownership, commodity exports and large corporations with extraordinary access to the state.
Few companies illustrate this better than JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker. Its controlling family has access not only to the Brazilian government but also to Trump, with a US subsidiary donating US$5 million to Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the largest single disclosed contribution. In 2026, JBS co-owner Joesley Batista helped broker a meeting between Lula and Trump.
What this reveals is not an improper exchange, but a more structural problem: a private businessman can move between presidents, governments, and countries with an influence unavailable to organisations representing family farmers, workers or consumers.
While the fiercest electoral arguments concern who can make food cheaper or protect families from hunger, much less is said about who has acquired the power to decide what Brazil produces, exports, and eats.
Brazil’s recent history leaves us with two lessons.
The first is hopeful: coordinated public policy can reduce hunger remarkably quickly, even in a deeply unequal country.
The second is less comfortable: those gains can be reversed when institutions are dismantled, and rebuilding them does not automatically redistribute power within the food system.
We cannot hold up Brazil as either a simple success story or a cautionary tale about government failure.
What it really shows is that not only is hunger a political choice, but also that preventing its return requires more than rescuing people after the system has already failed them. It requires a democracy capable of governing the food system itself.
Thin’s Pickings
The three regulatory fixes that could turn Europe’s food labels into a One Health instrument - CAP Reform
Interesting guest post from Pablo Palencia Garrido-Lestache, Spanish veterinarian, consultant, and former Regional Minister, on turning Europe’s system of protected food names to align with public health as well as economic and environmental sustainability.F*ck the Food Pyramid, Meet The RING Diet model by The Sioux Chef. - The Sioux Chef by Sean Sherman
The RING (Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide) Diet is Sean’s response to the USDA’s new upside down food pyramid, which he says “should really have NASCAR style sponsorship logos to show who is spending money to control what you eat”.Political Economy - Richard Murphy
This LinkedIn post provides a digestible illustration of what political economy is and why it matters. For those too busy to read my earlier post.
The Anti-Aesthetics of Tinto de Verano - Everyday Drinking
Guest poster Noah Chichester waxes lyrical about unpretentious Spanish food and drinks, in particular the quintessential summer drink Tinto de Verano. As a fellow fan myself - it’s my tipple of choice in the summer months, including the past few weeks - I couldn’t agree more with this piece.FSSAI to introduce red warning labels on chips, sugary drinks and packaged foods - The Indian Express
In late July, when The Wire published our joint investigation into India’s decade-long process to enact a front-of-pack labelling scheme, it wrote about how the country’s top food regulator has yet to respond to the Supreme Court’s direction months earlier that it proposes warning labels.
It seems this has finally happened, although there are possible loopholes and no details on the timeline and suggestions of loopholes.
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