O Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar: entre estruturas, desigualdades e cooperação

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE) as a cross-cutting public policy capable of articulating food security, local development, cultural valorization, and international cooperation. The research adopts a logical-theoretical-historical perspective to understand the program not as a static initiative, but as the result of continuous processes shaped by political, economic, and social disputes at both domestic and international levels. The sources used combine the collection of the Observatório de Alimentação Escolar (OAE), the digital library of the World Food Programme (WFP), official documents, legislation, and consolidated academic literature on the subject. The analysis departs from the global agrifood system and its historical regimes to contextualize the structural inequalities that condition access to food, particularly among children and adolescents. It then reconstructs the trajectory of Brazilian food policies, identifying how the PNAE transcended its origins as an assistentialist program to become a multidimensional instrument of public policy. The study demonstrates that the decentralization of management, the mandatory procurement from family farming, and the participation of social control mechanisms produced cascading effects on the rural economy and the reduction of inequalities in the countryside. The research also shows that the implementation of the program in indigenous, quilombola, and traditional communities faces structural barriers that isolated legal frameworks alone cannot overcome, including logistical, bureaucratic, and infrastructure challenges. At the international level, the work analyzes the role of the Centro de Excelência Contra a Fome as a vehicle for South-South cooperation, showing how the Brazilian experience inspired school feeding policies in more than sixty countries. As a limitation, the study acknowledges that the analysis relied predominantly on documentary and institutional sources, without incorporating the direct perspectives of farmers, school cooks, municipal managers, and students.