We find ourselves at a crisis. The tumult of the world economy has reached our shores, and as soon as it hit, it reached into our dockyards and warehouses. Our nation's storerooms are full and bursting from oversupply, and the financial solvency of our merchants has been hit hard.
At the same time, our farmers and factory workers have been thrown onto the streets. While our nascent unemployment insurance and union funds have stifled the worst of the effects in cities, the slack does need to be picked up in our more rural areas; with those who were kicked off their land streaming into our cities, these resources will be stretched even more thinly. Clearly we must act before these resources collapse completely, leaving huge masses of workers starving.
To prevent the situation from becoming a true humanitarian crisis, we propose the following bill to allow for some level of mitigation of hunger among our lowest classes. We would hope for support across all the political spectrum for this, as even the Integralists, on whom we agree with rarely on serious policy issues, have themselves seen the need to feed our poor socially. We simply wish to take their work and expand it beyond what they alone could do.
Whereas the exporters of foodstuffs across Brasil have run into a severe food glut from an unprecedented drop in demand globally, and
Whereas there are increasing numbers of rural and urban jobless who are unable to provide for themselves,
We propose the following:
Section 1. The owners of foodstuffs currently sitting in storage around the country may elect to sell any extra surplus products to the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, at 75 per-cent of the market price of the type of good.
Section 1a. This commodity price is to be calculated by a five-year running average of the history of commodity prices as published in various authoritative sources as deemed fit to use by the Ministry, and be calculated on a per-commodity basis.
Section 2. The Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, working in coordination with those government officers coordinating the implementation of the ILO Compliance act, will set up regional Food Banks coordination districts, one in each state, and also one in the Federal District and the Territory of Acre.
Section 2a. The food acquired in the purchase from section 1 of this bill will be distributed to the regional food banks on an as-needed basis, as overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Section 2b. These regional food banks will coordinate with the appropriate State offices to assess where food distribution centers are needed for the populace, in both urban and rural environments, and set out a strategy to adequately cover the state with Welfare Kitchens given the resources available.
Section 2c. These regional food banks will seek to hire local workers to prepare and distribute the food at individual Welfare Kitchens.
Section 2d. The Welfare Kitchens will be open to all poor and unemployed members of the community.
