Ningde, Guaribas and the concrete boldness of a world without hunger

Under the milestone of 50 years of the resumption of Brazil-China relations, there is, once again, a wide dissemination of the Chinese economic and technological advances that have amazed us on a daily basis for some time now. However, the greatest of Chinese achievements of recent decades is much less known. In 2021, that country celebrated the end of absolute poverty and hunger, and this in the most populous territory on the planet and which suffered brutal European colonialism throughout the 19th century. More than 600 million people were removed from the scourge of poverty, something never before seen in humanity.

Not seen, not even dreamed. Hunger, for millennia, was considered basically inevitable and inescapable of the condition of gigantic populations. If, on the one hand, it was eradicated in post-war Europe by the Welfare State, on the other, it was naturalized forever throughout the Global South. Josué de Castro was bold and innovative when he affirmed, in the 1940s, hunger as an eminently socioeconomic problem and not a natural or climatic one: “Hunger is not a destiny, but a political choice”, he said. From the creation of the FAO in 1945 to the inclusion of the Zero Hunger goal among the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2012, advances have been made in the visibility of the hungry on the global political agenda.

Brazil, under the leadership of President Lula, was an essential part of this process, with the country’s withdrawal from the Hunger Map in 2014 and the real possibility of leaving again now, in a more institutionally sustained way so that we can never go back, with a Interministerial Brazil Without Hunger Plan and a National Food and Nutritional Security System with massive support from states and municipalities.

Brazil, in this trajectory, not only studied the geography of hunger since the first half of the 20th century, but also organized citizenship actions to transform these studies into a thriving social movement in the post-dictatorship and, finally, to take the lead in the international debate in the beginning of the 21st century based on very well-structured public policies, such as Bolsa Família, the Cisternas Program and the Food Acquisition Program.

However, even with all this progress, we have a world that still lives with 733 million people in severe food insecurity, according to the UN. More than ever, it is necessary to know that it is possible that populations can overcome hunger, even when we count them in the hundreds of millions. The Chinese experience reveals this to us, knowing what and how they planned this leap is, therefore, urgent.

The translation into Portuguese of President Xi Jinping’s work “Overcoming Poverty” (Editora Contraponto, 2024) helps us to better understand this achievement. It brings texts from the beginning of this story (1988-1990), when still in the small city of Ningde, in Fujian province, the focus of economic development became “government for the people” (Mínsheng). Trying to make the “weak bird the first to fly”, the then municipal secretary Xi, practically unknown at the time, mobilized a community to bring together their economic and cultural potentials with the aim of having a more dignified future. After 30 years, those initiatives to seek development appropriate to local conditions and improvement of basic rural infrastructures have been refounded, remade and complemented countless times, reaching not only the province of Fujian but also building giant policies, such as agrarian reforms, rural revitalizations, transfers of income, active search for the low-income throughout China.

The translation of the book adds to the initiatives of Brazilian universities that have long been working together to understand economic and political formations that are so distant, but so successful. Knowing China even more as a space free from hunger is an unavoidable task. At the Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, Family and Combating Hunger, led by Minister Wellington Dias, we are promoting, now as a priority for the federal government, this endeavor: gathering and cataloging this experience, its legal designs, its bureaucratic organizational form, to the point of transforming it into a public policy that can inspire others in different national contexts.

This is the contribution of the technical pillar of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, with almost 90 countries already signatories: to present the successful experience of Brazil, China and all other countries in the world — such as the People’s Bank of India or the Mexican income transfer programs — which have already managed, at some level, to transform the ideal of a world without hunger into concrete material, into normative propositions, into administrative law institutions, into rural technical assistance, into business structuring so that we can leave of course only that which is not known is an unanswered scourge.

To paraphrase the leader of Chinese modernization Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), the task is to bring together cats of all colors to better hunt the rats of hunger and global inequality that, incredibly, still live with 733 million people in severe food insecurity, according to the UN. What emerged in small Ningde, in the late 1980s, mobilized the most populous country in the world. What emerged in the small town of Guaribas, the birthplace of the Zero Hunger Program in the semi-arid region of Piauí, in 2003, meant that Brazil and hunger were no longer considered linked forever. Our hope, with the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, is that, in the coming years, in Latin America, Africa and Asia, ten, one hundred, one thousand Ningdes and Guaribas can begin to take large steps so that, at some point moment, humanity can finally declare our planet a territory free from hunger and poverty.

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