Amazon Initiative Replaces Ultra-Processed Foods with Traditional School Meals

Created in Amazonas, Catrapovos inspired federal rules that make it easier for public schools to buy food from Indigenous, quilombola, and other traditional communities

An expedition to the remote Pico da Neblina, in São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas), in 2016, intrigued federal prosecutor Fernando Merloto Soave, of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF): if it took him, a man weighing 80 kilograms, nearly three days to reach the site, how could hundreds of kilograms of school meals possibly make that same journey to supply schools in such isolated communities?

Reaching the peak — the highest in Brazil, at nearly 3,000 meters — requires taking an unpaved road 80 kilometers long, starting from downtown São Gabriel da Cachoeira, a trip that takes three to five hours. From there, it’s another six hours by voadeira (a small motorboat typical of the region, powered by a 40 HP outboard motor), entering through the Yá-Mirim stream and crossing the Cauaburis River for 90 kilometers

The last outpost before the climb up the mountain is the cluster of Yanomami communities known as Maturacá, home to roughly 1,500 Indigenous people. It was there, between hikes through the forest and lunches of queixada — a wild peccary, a wild pig native to the region — that the prosecutor went looking for answers.

“During one of the hikes, I saw the problems firsthand. Young people were leaving for wildcat mining, a very rudimentary kind of mining, because they had no income. At the same time, when I asked whether school meals were reaching them, the mothers began complaining that their children only wanted to eat canned food and no longer wanted to eat what they cooked. ‘But do you have anything here that you could sell?’ I asked. They said they had one thing or another, but only for subsistence, because there was no viable way to transport it for sale.”

The question raised on that trip would give rise to an unprecedented network in Amazonas and, nearly a decade later, help inspire a national regulation. Published by the National Fund for the Development of Education (FNDE, the agency under the Ministry of Education responsible for transferring funds for school meals in Brazil), the new resolution formalizes the purchase of food produced by traditional peoples and communities for Brazil’s school meal program.

The realization that these communities were producing healthy food that often went to waste, while schools were served menus packed with ultra-processed products, convinced Merloto that it was necessary to bring together authorities and community leaders to find solutions addressing two goals at once — improving the nutritional quality of school meals while ensuring that traditional foods were valued, both culturally and financially.

The prosecutor then began organizing a series of meetings with representatives of public agencies, civil society, and Yanomami leaders, starting in late 2016. “Every Indigenous, riverine, and Quilombola community should be able to sell its products to its own school. There shouldn’t be a need to transport school meals all the way out there. Everything should be bought there or nearby. We’re in the middle of a climate crisis, with fossil fuel use in transportation and all this shipping back and forth. There’s no reason to spend so much money unnecessarily,” he argued.

The following year, the meetings produced a practical outcome. On September 15, 2017, a technical note was published to guide public administrators in creating specific public calls (a simplified public procurement mechanism) for traditional peoples and communities under the National School Feeding Program (Pnae).

The Pnae is one of Brazil’s main public food security policies. The program funds meals for public school students and requires that at least 30% of the food purchased come from family farming. The technical note made it possible for these purchases to include Indigenous peoples, Quilombolas, riverine communities, caiçaras (traditional coastal communities), and other groups with their own ways of life and production.

The technical note emphasized the need to adapt registration, inspection, and health oversight requirements to the reality of Indigenous peoples, so that rules designed for industrial supply chains would not make it impossible to purchase traditional foods. This addressed one of the biggest obstacles to public procurement of these products, according to Merloto.

Informally and without much fanfare, the document created the Amazonas Traditional Peoples’ Food Commission (Catrapoa), a permanent forum bringing together non-governmental organizations, traditional community leaders, and representatives of the three levels of government to discuss traditional food.

“Back then, there were only two mechanisms for purchasing school meals — either a bidding process, to buy from large businesses, or a public call for family farming.” He is referring to Law 11,947/2009, which requires that at least 30% of Pnae food be purchased from the latter group. “With Catrapoa, a third mechanism was created. It has much less bureaucracy, makes access easier, and has health requirements suited to how these peoples actually live — no certification stamps, no registration, none of that. In other words, someone fishes in the lake, raises their own chickens, makes their own manioc flour, and delivers it to the local school just like that.”

“This generated income in a context where people were being drawn into illegal activities; it reduced public spending, because products no longer had to be transported such long distances; it created food security and food sovereignty; and it generated health,” the prosecutor observes.

The beginning

Only three Indigenous producers took part in the first public call linked to Catrapoa. “Everyone got pretty discouraged. So I said: ‘Let’s not give up. Come on, let’s make this happen.’ The following year, 60 showed up,” the prosecutor recalls, with pride.

Farmer and Indigenous organizer Cenaide Pastor Lima took part in a public call organized by Catrapoa in 2019, collectively, alongside the Tuyuka Indigenous Residents’ Association of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Production is carried out by the Nossa Senhora Auxiliadora community, on the border between the municipality’s urban and rural areas, together with 23 families from different ethnic groups.

“The first time, since we had no experience taking part in public calls, we had a lot of difficulty, especially opening bank accounts. Over time, we worked through that red tape and everything got easier for the following ones. The public call is good because it’s a way to plan what you’re going to produce for the year. It gives you security, because the product doesn’t just sit there unsold,” he says.

Building on that successful experience, Lima decided it was essential to share the knowledge, which could be converted into income. Since then, he has taken to the river by boat, traveling among communities to spread the word about Catrapoa and help draw up sales proposals, something he still does today, representing the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro (Foirn).

The organizer says the main barriers are linguistic differences among Indigenous peoples — he always makes a point of bringing a local translator, despite speaking several languages himself — and the frequent lack of identification documents. On this front, the commission has also made a meaningful contribution. “With Catrapoa, we’ve been able to organize task forces to help Indigenous farmers get their documents in order. This is work that’s about food, about selling products, but what we bring to communities goes far beyond that. When a farmer gets a document to be able to sell their goods, they’re also opening the door to social benefits, especially retirement. It’s their future. Once someone has an ID, they have rights.”

Catrapovos is born

Through dialogue among the peoples involved and the work of organizers like Cenaide, Catrapoa gained traction across Amazonas. “We started popping up all over the state,” says Merloto.

Despite this growth, the prosecutor was wary of expanding the initiative nationally. “We know how much influence agribusiness has over political decisions in Brazil. We knew, back then, how much this effort could chip away at their market, because what was reaching schools in these communities were canned goods. It was a complicated undertaking. If it landed on the radar of lobbyists, we’d be facing an enemy before we even got started. So we deliberately kept it confined to Amazonas for almost five years.”

The expansion, however, proved unavoidable. Driven by the success of the state-level network, the MPF’s 6th Chamber issued, from Brasília, on June 1, 2020, technical note 03/2020, which extends the legal interpretation to the entire country. It also stopped applying only to Indigenous peoples and began covering all traditional peoples and communities.

Still in 2020, Catrapoa received the 17th Innovare Award, one of the most prestigious in the Brazilian justice system. It was the spark needed to formalize and launch its national version, the Catrapovos Brazil Permanent Dialogue Roundtable (Catrapovos), established in 2021 by the MPF’s 6th Chamber.

Today, 20 states have their own commission, each with its own dynamics and composition — some are coordinated by civil society organizations, others by municipal governments, for example. All of them, however, include the participation of some oversight body, whether the Federal or State Public Prosecutor’s Office or the Public Defender’s Office.

On the ground

In the Vale do Ribeira region (São Paulo), Catrapovos worked to restore the identity of Quilombola communities, says Vanilda Donato dos Santos, a farmer and president of the Association of Quilombo Remnants of Bairro Porto Velho, in Iporanga (São Paulo). Quilombolas are descendants of Black communities originally formed by people who resisted enslavement in Brazil.

She says children had lost interest in eating at home, because they had unrestricted access to ultra-processed foods in their school meals, such as chocolate milk drinks, cream-filled cookies, and processed meats. She attributes the shift to a “food racism” present in schools.

“We’ve noticed there’s a deeply racist form of education at work. They don’t talk about us, they don’t tell our history, and they still teach that our style of eating — a manioc fritter, potatoes, pork, free-range chicken — is bad, because it’s fattening, because it raises cholesterol, and so on. But food isn’t just about not being hungry. It’s about reclaiming history. It’s about belonging. It’s about identity. You can’t use food to destroy a people’s culture. And that’s what was happening,” she says.

Vanilda takes part in public calls run by the Iporanga municipal government, based on the Catrapovos framework. Through them, she is able to sell her surplus rice, beans, sweet potatoes, manioc, spiny yam, squash, and peanuts.

She recalls how students reacted when the initiative reached community schools. “The kids were so happy. They went around telling their teachers: ‘My mom planted this lettuce.’ ‘My grandmother sent this chicken.’ That connection between school and community was made possible through Catrapovos. It’s a kind of re-education that reclaims our food culture, both for students and for their parents. Reconnecting with our past is what will secure our future.”

In São Gabriel da Cachoeira, the main challenge is the lack of electricity in many communities. According to nutritionist Beatriz Castro, of the municipal Department of Education, many schools still receive ultra-processed foods for school meals because they can’t store proteins.

“In many communities, we don’t send protein because there’s no electricity. We’d basically have to send just rice and pasta, with no side dish at all. So they end up with canned goods, cookies, dried meat, sardines. Those communities are our main focus. The goal is for them to move forward so that, next year, they can put together projects and replace those ultra-processed foods with fish, chicken, and eggs,” she reports.

The nutritionist illustrates the importance of the initiative with a vivid memory. “Something that stuck with me was on a trip to the Tiquié River, when I saw two children paddling a canoe, dressed in their school uniforms, with sneakers and backpacks. Even without many resources, there they were, seeking an education. I think that for them to have a profession in the future, they depend on a proper education. And a proper school depends on adequate nutrition. Without that, those children won’t even have the chance to dream.”

National rule

The guidelines built by Catrapovos have now given rise to a national regulation. In June, the FNDE published a resolution formalizing the purchase of food produced by traditional peoples and communities under the Pnae.

The new rule authorizes the purchase of these products through specific public calls, a simplified public procurement mechanism. In practice, it provides greater legal certainty for municipalities and states to buy food directly from Indigenous, Quilombola, riverine, caiçara, and other traditional farmers to supply schools located within their own territories.

The resolution seeks to address a long-standing contradiction: in communities that produce fresh, healthy, and culturally appropriate food, many schools still receive menus based on canned goods, cookies, processed meats, and other ultra-processed products, purchased outside the territory and shipped over long distances.

Under the new rule, these producers are no longer subject, for these specific purchases, to the health and bureaucratic requirements designed for industrial supply chains or large suppliers. The goal is to recognize the traditional peoples’ own methods of production, preparation, and consumption, without turning these foods into standardized commodities in the mold of the conventional market.

For Fernando Merloto Soave, the change represents an important step, but it does not conclude the work of the state-level dialogue roundtables. Putting the rule into practice will still depend on mobilizing public agencies, municipal administrators, communities, and civil society organizations to make sure the public calls actually reach these territories.

The prosecutor dreams of a day when this kind of purchase stops being the exception. “Every riverine, Indigenous, and Quilombola community should have the right to bring its products to its own local school — which is their backyard, where their children are — without needing to have school meals shipped in from far away,” he says.

But the struggle goes beyond bureaucracy. At the heart of the experience is an idea of food sovereignty: children have the right to eat healthy, culturally appropriate food produced in their own territories. And traditional communities have the right to see their food recognized as part of their future, not as a relic of the past.