The human right to adequate food and sustainable development goals: collective interferences with children in vulnerable peripheries

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the relation between the Human Right to Adequate Food (HRAF) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), from a dialogic experience with children and adolescents on the outskirts of São Vicente, São Paulo. Using the methodological framework of participatory research, observation and record of community assemblies and the partnership between the university and social movements point to a welcoming place for children/adolescents, which enable collective diagnostic readings on food. Dialogical processes enable us to problematize HRAF dimensions from the chain of production, food commercialization and consumption, and the instability to which children/adolescents are subjected in a complex network of determinants which produce hunger and malnutrition in the territories in which they live. Our results show that these dimensions dialogue with all the SDGs and with the cultural, economic, social, and environmental sustainability of food. The partnership and articulation between university and society strengthens and enhances the spaces of social control and training of actors to struggle toward HRAF. It can change inequalities in the territories and recognize children as a subject of rights with deep ethical rigor in the construction of inclusive listening and qualified practices.