Programa de aquisição de alimentos e estado nutricional: uma avaliação dos municípios brasileiros

Abstract

As the global community mobilizes in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is notable how Brazil still lacks better indicators, especially related to goal number 2, hunger eradication, which explicitly deals with ensuring access to safe and nutritious food for low-income and vulnerable populations (UNITED NATIONS, 2020). In this sense, the role that social-agricultural policies such as the Food Acquisition Program (FAP) play promoting food and nutritional security in the Brazilian context becomes strategic. The Food Acquisition Program seeks to promote the productive inclusion of low-income farmers and guarantee access in quantity, quality and regularity to the population in food and nutritional insecurity status. Therefore, our study aimed to: i) Measure FAP`s average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) on the nutritional status of participating municipalities in 2019, measured by the proportion of children aged 5 to 10 years with adequate weight, and ii) Identify socioeconomic variables that predict the probability of municipalities participating in the program. Our study analyzes a sample of 5570 Brazilian municipalities, of which 1398 participated in the FAP in 2019. Based on a Propensity Score Matching methodology, our study uses information from a set of municipalities that do not participate in the Food Acquisition Program to identify what would have happened to the participating municipalities in the absence of the intervention. Our results identify a positive and significant effect of the participation of municipalities in the Food Acquisition Program, with an increase of about 1.5% in the proportion of the population with adequate weight (eutrophic), therefore attesting the effectiveness of the program for promoting food and nutritional security. Additionally, we confirmed that the FAP complies with the priority criteria originally established by the program, which sets municipalities present in the Mapa Insan to be primarily served by the program.