15. Promotion of food security and nutrition

We commit to establish a food security policy to permit availability and access of the population to sufficient quality food to guarantee an active and healthy life within a comprehensive human development conception.

With this objective, the State: (a) will foster sustainable and diversified food production, increasing productivity, fighting pests and preserving natural resources, tending to decrease dependence on food imports; (b) will guarantee that available foods are economically accessible, appropriate and sufficient to guarantee the needs for energy and nutrients among the population; (c) will prevent food imports from changing healthy consumption patterns among the population, stressing food dependence and affecting national basic food production; (d) will promote the establishment of an obligatory ethics code for the trade of food, which compliance shall be supervised by an Intersectorial Food and Nutrition Council aiming at guaranteeing the population’s life and health; (e) will apply, together with local government and organized society, quality controls and surveillance on production, trade, storage and distribution of food for human consumption, so as to ensure ideal quality and sanitary conditions of same; (f) will guarantee basic sanitation; (g) will promote participation, organization and surveillance of consumers as a democratic citizen exercise; (h) will take measures against threats to food security, such as drought, desertification, pests, erosion of biological diversity, land and water degradation. To do so, it will promote land rehabilitation and germplasms preservation; (i) will reinforce public and private research on agriculture, cattle raising, forestry and other resources; (j) will make it possible for families and people exposed to food insecurity to satisfy their food and nutritional needs and will provide assistance to those who are not in the condition of doing so; (k) will ensure access to food and appropriate nutrition, especially for children under five and infants, and pregnant women and school children, for extreme poor and vulnerable people, as well as families in poverty or risk situation, promoting a broad participation, surveillance and self management of organized civil society and beneficiary families; (l) will develop a participatory intersectorial policy for food security, with decentralized programs to comprehensively address more nutrition problems; (m) will stimulate and promote breastfeeding in the first year of life; (n) will provide food and nutritional supplements to extreme poor and vulnerable population, (o) will train and educate the population on nutrition, health, hygiene, nutritional surveillance and citizen rights to achieve appropriate nutrition; (p) will include nutritional education content in educational programs; (q) will recover and value original healthy knowledge and nutritional habits; (r) will disseminate nutritional virtues of agribusiness derivates from local crops; and (s) will promote active participation of people and social groups overcoming handout and paternalism approaches.