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Brazil's bold food policies highlight South Africa's missed opportunities in school nutrition reform.

Brazil's bold food policies highlight South Africa's missed opportunities in school nutrition reform.
School desks donated to St Paul's Primary School in Bo Kaap by McDonalds and MiDesk on February 24, 2025 in Cape Town South Africa. The handover was made possible through a partnership with McDonalds and MiDesk Global, and give further impetus to the Departments goal of enhancing access, equity and quality in rural schools. (Photo: Gallo Images / ER Lombard)
Adèle Sulcas
By Adèle Sulcas
17 Mar 2025
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While Brazil announces stringent restrictions on the inclusion of ultra-processed foods in school meals, South Africa’s education department, responsible for the National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP), appears to be actively promoting ultra-processed food brands, acting at odds with pending health department legislation prohibiting the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. In a nod to International School Meals Day, Daily Maverick took a closer look.

On February 24, Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, celebrated on social media a McDonald’s “donation” of heavily branded school bag-desks to Grade 1 learners at a primary school in Bo-Kaap, Western Cape. At the same time, Brazil — a country with similar hunger, malnutrition and non-communicable disease (NCD) epidemics to South Africa (SA) — is raising the bar on protecting the health of its youngest citizens by tightening its restrictions on the amount of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) that can legally be included in public-school meals. 

Brazil’s intention is to lessen the impact that processed foods and drinks have on children’s diets and nationally high rates of obesity and related NCDs, promote healthy eating habits, protect family- and small-scale farming. 

Not only is SA far behind relative to Brazil and 66 other countries in imposing mandatory healthy public-food procurement programmes for schools. But by actively promoting at least one globally dominant ultra-processed food brand, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) appears to be blindly working against its own school meals policy (which on paper proposes healthy, nutritious meals), and against upcoming Department of Health (DoH) legislation.

The draft legislation, part of a regulation on food labelling, marketing, and health claims for packaged foods and drinks (called R3337) was signed by Minister of Health Joe Phaahla in March 2023 but has yet to be enacted. It includes warning labels on unhealthy foods, and restrictions on marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks to children, including in or near schools. 

The global prevalence of child stunting has also dropped sharply (by almost 18% in children under five), but in SA, it has actually risen.

Daily Maverick requested comment in late February from the DBE — from Dr Granville Whittle, head of the department that oversees school meals nationally, and from DBE spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga — but has received no response to date. We also asked the DoH for comment on this apparent misalignment of government policy, and await their reply. 

Like Brazil, SA has astronomically high levels of obesity, overweight people (see chart below) and diabetes, as well as of hunger and malnutrition (overnutrition and undernutrition are often found in the same household, due to inadequate access to healthy food). And like Brazil, SA spends a lot of money on a school meals programme.

Public-school meals in Brazil are served daily to more than 40 million children in 150,000 schools through its National School Feeding Program (PNAE), costing R5.5-billion Brazilian Reais, or R18-billion annually. 

In SA, 9.7 million learners in more than 21,000 schools depend on the NSNP — about three in every four learners — according to the DBE. The NSNP cost the government R8.4-billion in 2022/23 (2.8% of the R299.7-billion spent on education over that period), says Stats SA.

Yet SA is not out of the starting blocks on mandatory healthy-public-food-procurement programmes for schools, which have proven effective in helping to lower obesity rates among schoolchildren. An article in scientific peer-reviewed journal Preventative Medicine showed that Brazil’s healthy school feeding programme has been effective in lowering obesity rates among school-children by 24%, among 12,373 students attending Brazilian public schools offering healthy school meals under the national system.

Brazil is not South Africa


Professor Rina Swart from the University of the Western Cape’s Centre of Excellence in Food Security, told Daily Maverick that “Brazil has made great progress with regards to their school feeding program”. But she said understanding how Brazil and SA’s different policies have driven very different outcomes is “not straightforward” and that “all the poverty-related aspects” need to be considered too. “One aspect that is definitely different between Brazil and South Africa is the awareness and interest in healthier food and healthier food environments,” she said.



Both SA and Brazil’s hunger, obesity, and other forms-of-malnutrition problems are part of a bigger national picture in which socio-economic divides are enormous. Brazil, starting decades ago, launched its PNAE feeding programme as one important part of a multisectoral food and nutrition security strategy, considered by experts to have been crucial in narrowing the socio-economic gaps between wealthy and poorer families. 

One measure of this strategy’s success, reported by a team of Brazilian researchers in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2010, has been “a steady decline” in the national prevalence of child stunting (low height for age). Figures show: over a 33-year period, from 1996 to 2007, stunting overall dropped from 37% to 7%, and from 59% to 11% in the poorest one-fifth of the population (and from 12% to 3% among the wealthiest one-fifth).

The global prevalence of stunting has also dropped sharply (by almost 18% in children under five), but in SA, it has actually risen. In the 1990s, it ranged between 22% and 27%. Today stunting is higher than ever: 29%, says the University of Cape Town’s Child Gauge 2024 report (data from Statistics South Africa). Stunting is considered by public health experts to be a leading indicator of child wellbeing and human development. 

By 2025, the Brazilian government will lower the limit of processed and ultra-processed foods in public school menus from 20% to 15% through the PNAE National School Feeding Program.

School desks donated to St Paul's Primary School in Bo Kaap by McDonald's and MiDesk on 24 February 2025 in Cape Town. The handover was made possible through a partnership with McDonald's and MiDesk Global. (Photo: Gallo Images / ER Lombard)


‘Unhealthy’ food restrictions in Brazil schools


Even with such impressive successes over decades, Brazil continues to impose increasingly strenuous measures against exposing children to the highly processed and ultra-processed foods that now dominate the global food supply — which highlights even more starkly the South African government’s inability or unwillingness to fulfil, in the first instance its Constitutional obligation to provide sufficient food for all (Article 27 of the Bill of Rights), and to hold itself accountable to its citizens for its failure to do so. Brazil has a similar Constitutional obligation, with the right to adequate food added to the country’s Constitution in 2010.

Brazil’s February 2025 decree signals a renewed focus on the importance of nutritious school feeding under President Luiz “Lula” Inácio da Silva, who introduced the “Zero Hunger” (Fome Zero) programme in 2003. 

“No one can study on an empty stomach,” President Lula said. “A child who leaves home without breakfast, or who hasn’t had a proper dinner with the necessary calories and protein, how can they learn at school? Those who have never been hungry don’t understand how much hunger can limit learning.” 

The new decree states that 85% of the government’s 2025 budget for public school meals must be allocated to raw or minimally processed foods and freshly prepared meals. This will increase to 90% by 2026, reducing the maximum proportion of UPFs in school meals to 10%. 

‘No limits’ unhealthy SA school meals 


South Africa has no restrictions or limitations on UPFs in schools and school meals. In the absence of such laws, many companies claim to have adopted “voluntary” policies that restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks to children, yet brazenly flout these undertakings, which are neither enforced nor monitored.

South Africa’s National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) does prioritise — at least theoretically — nutritious meals and healthy eating habits, and encourages schools to establish food gardens from which they source and cook fresh fruits and vegetables. 

Read more: Obesity in South Africa — experts explain how inequality is driving the surge

Yet South Africa only has “voluntary healthy public food procurement policies” – for schools and all public entities and institutions – according to the World Health Organization’s Global Database on the Implementation of Food and Nutrition Action (GIFNA), which tracks and compares all countries’ policies on healthy food procurement for public institutions such as schools and hospitals. 

Suppliers to school meals


Thabang Mpihlangene, the spokesperson for food suppliers contracted by the NSNP, told Daily Maverick that NSNP suppliers believe that children should have improved, healthy nutrition. “Learners must be taught from early stages to eat healthy food – greens, vegetables, food from the ground. We can’t bombard them with meat and fats at their early stage, to avoid obesity and malnutrition.” 

“Looking at the trend in public schools to eat junk — amagwinya [vetkoek, or deep-fried dough], chips — you’ll understand there’s nothing that speaks about healthy eating.” Mpihlangene said learners must also be educated about eating healthy food, “so that there’s going to be an extension into the community in terms of how important eating healthier is for their lives — it starts from school and goes into the community.”

Aware of the successes Brazil has effected in changing attitudes and behaviour to healthy eating, Mpihlangene told Daily Maverick: “Looking at Brazil, they were in a similar situation to us, but they’ve managed to ace the [healthy school meals] programme.” 

Trailblazer


Only five years ago, Brazil had not enacted any national policies limiting or discouraging the consumption of ultra-processed foods, yet the country is now a trailblazer, especially among developing countries. 

An earlier decree in Brazil, in December 2023, limited for the first time the amount of ultra-processed food in school meals to 20%. This was considered a bold and pioneering step in a country considered to have been “hooked on junk food” by big business, as The New York Times wrote in a headline in 2017. 

Brazil’s national nutrition policy also addresses farming equity issues, by prioritising purchases from family farms, with an emphasis on women farmers, with the law mandating that 30% of the food purchased for schools must come from family farms. 

Read more: Research exposes high levels of misleading health claims, often on packaged foods targeting children

In SA, Mpihlangene says, most of the food procured for the NSNP comes from large wholesalers. “There are smallholder farmers around and people who are doing farming and planting goods that can support the programme, that we could buy directly from instead of going to wholesalers.”

“There’s a lot of work to be done in South Africa,” Mpihlangene said, “and a lot of benchmarking to be done as well.”

In the meantime, attempting to address the McDonald’s desk debacle, civil society organisations called for the Department of Basic Education to recall the branded desks and ensure that the provincial education department supplied desks to the school and desist from future partnerships with Big Food.

HEALA’s Zukiswa Zimela said in a joint statement, released by several civil society organisations: “This incident demonstrates that the South African government urgently needs to finalise regulations and develop legislation to restrict the marketing of unhealthy food in general, and to children in particular, as was done by other countries globally including Canada (Quebec), Norway, Iran, UK, Chile, Mexico, Ireland, Argentina, Portugal, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Spain and Sweden.” DM

Adèle Sulcas is a writer and senior advisor for Daily Maverick’s ‘Food Justice’ project, writing about food policy and systems, and intersections with climate and health.

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