Sustainable Food Systems: The case of CooperCentral VR - a 2nd Generation Coop in the supply of bananas to public schools in the city of Sao Paulo

Abstract

The paper presents a study performed in a second-generation cooperative CooperCentral VR, located at Vale do Ribeira - Sao Paulo, created to attend the national program for food acquisition to public schools. The aim was to investigate their main challenges with logistics to supply bananas twice a week to more than 2000 schools in the megacity of Sao Paulo. Twelve organizations of family farmers came together to produce and deliver bananas to schools in Sao Paulo. A semi-structured methodological approach was used to include interviews with managers, producers, and delivery people. Some difficulties in delivering bananas in each school were observed, such as, for example, concentrating all volume for deliveries in a unique warehouse, in addition to the legal requirement to present physical supporting documentation within each fruit delivery, which delayed and made it difficult serving many routes in the megacity. Electronic lists and their signatures in digital format, proposed by the interviewed collaborators can speed up registration in order to serve all schools on all suggested routes. The social organization showed the existence of an inclusive, counter-hegemonic logic of operation, based on the principles of solidarity economy, allowing employees to meet the assumed commitments and thus distribute more fairly the income generated from food production.