Os restaurantes populares e o enfrentamento da insegurança alimentar e nutricional no Maranhão: uma avaliação de possíveis impactos sob a ótica dos usuários e dos agricultores familiares.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on evaluating the possible impacts of the Popular Restaurants program on food and nutrition insecurity among its users and on the promotion of family farming in the municipalities of Caxias, Codó, Parnarama, and Afonso Cunha, in the state of Maranhão, Brazil. Grounded in historical-dialectical materialism and adopting a mixed-methods approach with methodological triangulation, the research combined structured questionnaires with restaurant users, focus groups with family farmers, semi-structured interviews with key policy stakeholders, on-site observations, and documentary analysis of management contracts. Qualitative data were analyzed through thematic content analysis, with analytical categories emerging from the dialectical movement between the theoretical framework and the empirical material. The results indicate that the program is effective in its immediate assistential dimension: 92.16% of users report that the program frees up part of the family budget, and over 72% report qualitative improvement in their diet. However, household-level food security indicators show that the Popular Restaurants operate as a food containment instrument without suppressing food insecurity in the domestic environment. In the production dimension, family farmers are excluded from institutional purchases in favor of large wholesalers, in contradiction with the program's intersectoral objectives. The analysis also identified a legal ambiguity in recent contracts, where punitive clauses use the expression "up to 30%" rather than "at least 30%", establishing a ceiling instead of a mandatory floor for purchases from family agriculture. It is concluded that the Popular Restaurants produce possible positive impacts confined to the consumption dimension, without consolidating themselves as drivers of local family farming development. Overcoming this limitation requires the State to act on two fronts: enforcing contractual compliance and providing structural support for rural production through technical assistance, land titling, and irrigation technologies.