I - Purchase with Simultaneous Donation;

II - PAA Milk;

III - Direct Purchase;

IV - Support for Stock Formation; and 

V - Institutional Purchase.

Ministry of Social Development and Assistance, Family and Fight against Hunger - MDS, in partnership with MDA/Conab, and (in the case of institutional purchase) other public organizations.

Decentralized and local agencies accredited with the MDA issue the Declaration of Aptitude (DAP, acronym in Portuguese) and/or Brazilian Register of Small-scale Farming (CAF, acronym in Portuguese) to the Brazilian Program for Strengthening Small-scale Farming (Pronaf, acronym in Portuguese), which identifies farmers and small-scale farmers and agrarian reform settlers who can apply for rural credit and access other government programs such as the School Feeding programme (PNAE, acronym in Portuguese). These bodies include representatives of the Brazilian Agency for Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (ANATER, acronym in Portuguese), the Brazilian Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA, acronym in Portuguese), and accredited rural unions and cooperatives.

For PAA Milk, the states provide the processing, storage and distribution structure. In the case of Institutional Purchases, each purchasing body coordinates its own arrangements when there is a need for storage and processing.

From the perspective of food distribution, the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS, acronym in Portuguese) and subnational governments are important partners in the sense of ensuring that vulnerable populations are registered in the Single Registry and that products from the Purchase with Simultaneous Donation and PAA Milk modalities are provided to the public most in need. 

The program was launched in 2003. The Purchase with Simultaneous Donation modality was introduced in 2012. The stipulation of a minimum of 30% of public purchases from small-scale family farmers, according to the Institutional Purchase modality, came into effect in 2015 (although the PNAE already operated under this rule on its own since 2009). In 2023, Law No. 14.628 also introduced the Solidarity Kitchens Program.

Currently operating.

As per the modalities described above.

DAP/CAF for producing beneficiaries and CadÚnico for recipients.

Beneficiary consumers:

a) people in situations of food and nutritional insecurity;

b) people served through:

1. the social assistance network;

2. public and social food and nutrition facilities; and

3. public and philanthropic education and health networks.

c) people who are in state custody in prisons or in detention centers of the socio-educational system; and

d) people served by food and nutrition actions as established by the PAA Management Group.

From a structured purchasing perspective, farmers and small-scale farmers are identified by decentralized agencies of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAPA) and accredited institutions through on-site evaluations and cross-checks with employment, social security, and rural property records.

From the perspective of food distribution in the purchase with simultaneous donation  and Milk modalities, the focus is based on the public registered in the Single Registry and on specific criteria set by the municipality. 

The distribution of seedlings and seeds, as well as the Stock Formation Support modality, are focused on associations or cooperatives duly recognized by MAPA.

Estimate of Family Farmers Suppliers by period

Participation limits by PAA modality for individual farms and cooperatives.

Execution through a partnership agreed with states and municipalities or through Conab.

Annual budget/expenditure of PAA Action 2798

Meta-analysis by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA, acronym in Portuguese) covering 158 mixed-method studies on PAA, mostly published between 2003 and 2016, highlights the following positive findings¹:

• Increased the area produced;

• Increased self-esteem of small-scale farmers;

• Increased production autonomy of small-scale farmers;

• Increased marketing/sale of surplus;

• Increased the hiring of permanent and/or temporary jobs;

• Increased participation of young people and women in productive activities;

• Increased income;

• Increased access to consumer goods;

• Increased access to new markets;

• Increased access to other public policies such as Pronaf (which offers subsidized rural credit) and PNAE (school feeding program implemented in Brazilian public schools);

• Increased production volume;

• Increased investments/technology;

• Appreciation of the prices of the products sold;

• Decreased sales to middlemen and increased bargaining power;

• Boosted  local economy;

• Diversification of production;

• Income diversification;

• Stimulation of agro-industrialization;

• Stimulation of self-consumption;

• Encouragement of cooperativism and associativism and/or community engagement;

• Strengthening organic or agroecological agriculture;

• Strengthening local food safety networks;

• Strengthening community relations and increasing collaboration among farmers;

• Production sale guarantee;

• Improvement of beneficiaries' food security and sovereignty.;

• Improvement of property structure;

• Improvement of the transport, storage and processing structure;

• Improvement of the quality of food produced and consumed;

• Improvement of the health of benefited consumers, especially in the case of children and adolescents;

• Improvement in the technological level of the production system;

• Positive changes in the consumption habits of the benefited families;

• Children's permanence in the countryside/ reduction of rural exodus;

• Preservation of regional habits and cultures;

• Appreciation of farmers and small-scale farming products by the community.

Among the most robust and recent quantitative studies, we highlight the econometric analysis that measures the incidence of PAA with the municipalities classified as the most demanding of this type of action (expressed from the degree of exposure of the population to the risk of food security and the degree of dependence of farmers and small-scale farmers on public policies for access to markets). The study reveals that PAA focuses on municipalities with the highest demands, such as those in the North and Northeast. 

In the second half of 2020, PAA received extraordinary credits that allowed structured purchases from 8,952 additional farmers and small-scale family farmers, totaling an expense of R$172.7 million, in addition to the R$ 387.4 million in the program's regular budget that year.

1. Sambuichi, Regina Helena Rosa, Ricardo Kaminsk, Gabriela Perin, Iracema Ferreira de Moura, Elisângela Sanches Januário, Danilo Barbosa Mendonça, e Ana Flávia Cordeiro de Almeida. 2019. “Programa de aquisiçào de alimentos e segurança alimentar: modelo lógico, resultados e desafios de uma política pública voltada ao fortalecimento da agricultura familiar”. https://repositorio.ipea.gov.br/bitstream/11058/9319/1/TD_2482.pdf.