Resumo

In Brazil the government delivers 40 million meals a day to students at public schools at the total amount of over 760 million euros in 2021 (Conselho de Monitoramento e Avaliação de Políticas Públicas, 2020). The procurement of these meals is directly linked to smallholders sells as part (30%) of the schoo feeding budget must be used to buy from them. Even though it is a country wide public policy, there are many differences on how local governments in municipalities execute it, the percentage they buy from smallholders varies from zero to almost one hundred per cent.

Considering this context, we investigate the following research question: Does having a mayor of the same party that created this public policy at the federal level makes it more likely to achieve the law target of procuring from smallholders.

Our argument is that even though PNAE is nationwide public policy, there are institutions that can hinder or encourage its implementation, and these institutions are influenced by the color of the party in power. Based on the idea of policy-seeking party (Strom, 19

To investigate our research question, we use ordinary use cross section least square regression. Our main specification for the empirical model is the following: y_i=β_(0 )+β_(1 PT mayor)+β_(2 controls)+ε_i Where: y_i is the percentage of smallholder’s farmers product procurement over total food product procurement for a municipality in 2017 i, PT mayor is a dummy variable for party alignment, which takes 1 if the mayor is part of a PT coalition, controls are variables that can be related to the amount and ε_i is as the error term.

In the estimation use the average of the family farm procurement as the dependent variable. PT party elected mayor was significant at 1% confidence interval with a positive signal as predicted. The number of School Feeding Council meeting was significant but with negative signal, which is unexpected. Possibly because if there are too many meetings, it might suggest that the procurement process is too bureaucratic detail-oriented and it may harm smallholders’ farmers.

Our analysis illuminates that the implementation of smallholder’s products procurement in Brazilian school feeding program contingent on the color of the party in power in the municipalities. We did so based on the policy-seeking party idea and the recent political Brazilian context. We used countrywide quantitative data and ran ordinary least square regression using control variables.

Arretche , M., & Marques, E. (2020). The politics of politics: inequalities and inclusion in the PSDB and PT governments . Unesp Publisher. Bonduki, M. R. P. C. (2017). Entre chicotes e cenouras orgânicas: cooperação, coerção e coordenação na implementação das compras da agricultura familiar para o PNAE (Doctoral dissertation). Strom, K. (1990). A behavioral theory of competitive political parties. American journal of political science, 565-598.