Programas de alimentación escolar “de producción local”: ¿instrumento para la construcción de una nueva ecuación alimentaria?

The industrial agri-food regime demonstrates several problems, considered key issues for the New Food Equation (NFE) debate. At the heart of debate are food security, health problems, the sustainability of the agrifood system and the erosion of links between production and consumption. It is assumed that the Food School Programs (FSP) can be important instruments or “gateways” of food relocation and the emergence of a new agrifood regime. Thus, this article seeks to analyze the extent to which school feeding policies are aligned or contribute to the limited debate in the NFE's set of ideas. The contributions of the World Food Program policy, the Brazilian policy established as of 2009, were analyzed, as well as the referential of the authors Morgan and Sonnino, considered basilar in the discussion of the potential of the FSP in the reconstruction of the agrifood system. The basis of discussion of FSP’s as a gateway to an NFE is aligned with four basic principles, as follows: i) purchasing food from local and small-scale agriculture; ii) valuing food culture; iii) providing quality and healthy food to schoolchildren; iv) school feeding as a stimulus for as development of alternative production and consumption systems. It is possible to indicate that school feeding has the potential to build a new collective culture of sustainable development and an agrifood system supported by the reconnection between production and consumption. However, the State needs to create mechanisms and other intersectoral policies that favor small-scale production, processing, and marketing. Brazilian case demonstrates that significant progress has been made in the design of FSP, but other State structures have remained in the old patterns.