The War From Which Everyone Can Emerge Victorious: A Glimpse Of The New Champions Of Food Security At The United Nations

Given the limelight on Donald Trump’s oration this year at the UN General Assembly, one would be forgiven for thinking it will not go down in history books as a stage from which was delivered a rousing paean to multilateralism, democracy, and the rule of law. Yet to the world assembled in New York that day, the session began with exactly that, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, who preceded Trump onto the stage to give the first oration of the Assembly’s momentous eightieth session. 

Tensions over the jailing of Brazilian ex-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro for actions related to the insurrection following Lula’s election victory in 2022, made an obvious draw for those looking to point to the different political substances from which these two men are constituted. Yet one of Lula’s keynotes in particular permits us deeper insight into the ways that the two states – Brazil and the USA – are taking fundamentally different approaches to certain questions of citizens’ everyday security and safety. 

As I wrote recently for Europinion, the US presidential administration is today reconstructing the entire policy arena of food security, sharply rejecting the modern evolution of the concept into a multifaceted rights-based question and withdrawing vast amounts of funding across institutions. Instead, it is building an agri-defence force to focus on defending America’s voluminous agricultural production from threats germinating outside of the USA.

In contrast, at the General Assembly, Lula conveyed that accessing food in Brazil was taken as seriously as other questions of fundamental peace and security: “Poverty is as much an enemy of democracy as extremism,” adding, “the only war [from] which everyone can emerge victorious is the one we wage against hunger and poverty.” Social assistance entitlements first began to be introduced as features of state responsibility in Brazil in its 1988 democratic constitution, and it became recognised by subsequent governments that making the human right to adequate food a reality requires “intersectoral actions” articulated across “municipal, state, and federal spheres.”

Accordingly, The 2006 Organic Law on Food and Nutrition Security established the National Food and Nutrition Security System, before Brazil formally recognised the Human Right to Adequate Food in its constitution in 2010. In practice, this was backed by the ‘Zero Hunger’ policy ambition and its offspring like the ‘Programa Bolsa Familia’ (family bag programme, or PBF), launched in 2003. This built upon pre-existing municipal social security schemes to create a huge national, decentralised, scheme of direct conditional cash transfers (CCTs) to households in poverty – numbering well over 10 million. 

This intersectoral and holistic approach dovetailed with initiatives like providing school meals with food purchased from small-scale, local farmers, meaning that as well as lifting millions out of poverty, Brazil did it in a way that would actually “break the poverty cycle by obliging the recipients to invest in human capital.” Brazil was lifted off the UN Hunger Map in 2014, but destruction of social welfare infrastructure under the Bolsonaro government, as well as poorly managed responses to Covid-19, led to Brazil reappearing on the Hunger Map in 2022.

Following Lula’s re-election to the presidency in 2022, this broad intersectoral approach once more reignited policies like the PFB and the National School Feeding Programme as engines of Brazilian food security. This time, they were subsumed under the wide-reaching ‘Brasil Sem Fome’ (Brazil Without Hunger) programme, begun in 2023. It was then announced by the FAO in July 2025 that Brazil was once again off the Hunger Map –  a huge success given that it was 5 years ahead of the initial plan. 

Some observers have linked the successes of Brazil’s PBF with research produced by a Mexican CCT programme, Oportunidades. Indeed, the two countries share much about their approach to food security. Since 2011 Mexico has constitutionally recognised that, “all individuals have the right to nutritional, sufficient and quality nourishment. The State shall guarantee this.” Additionally, in 2024 Mexico adopted a broad legislative framework in support of this, called the General Law on Adequate and Sustainable Nutrition.   

In compiling the hunger map, however, the FAO’s methodology does not lay a heavy emphasis on nutrition, an important aspect of modern food security thinking. This is significant as countries like Brazil and Mexico – alongside many others – are going through a nutritional transition, from widespread undernutrition, to the ‘double burden’ of this alongside other malnutrition problems, namely obesity from calorie-dense highly processed foodstuffs. 

As for the large food exports produced by Brazil and Mexico themselves, their governments see global markets as important for supporting their own populations’ economic development as well as reinforcing a rights-based concept of food security worldwide. In this arena, Brazil has already shown how contrasts with the USA can be capitalised into record soy exports today, while Mexico recently took robust steps to protect its ‘native’ agricultural biodiversity by prohibiting the use of (mostly American) genetically-modified corn seeds. 

These are ambitious approaches to food security premised upon attempts to make a reality out of the rights-based approach to food security, and they will always be subjected to the vicissitudes of economic circumstance. But if the USA – once the hand that fed many around the world – continues its current course, it is just possible that in a generation much of the world will look to the likes of Brazil and Mexico, as not just sources of good food security policy, but also of good food itself. 

Illustrations: Will Allen/Europinion