Brazil has become the international benchmark for measuring national commitment to food security. Its Zero Hunger programme, launched in 2003, made eradicating hunger and fighting poverty key objectives on the domestic agenda. The government adopted a national food security and nutrition policy that recognizes the inalienable right of all citizens to sufficient, good quality food, and implemented it with a combination of emergency measures and programmes to redistribute income, boost food production and create employment. Within six years, initiatives such as the Bolsa Família cash transfer scheme for low-income families, free meals in every public school, and support to small-scale family farming had reduced the number of people facing food insecurity from 50 million to 30 million. Numbers fell most sharply in the country’s urban areas, from 24.5 million to 14.8 million. Many of the programmes implemented under Zero Hunger were pioneered in the 1990s in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Over the past two decades, the city government has crafted a highly acclaimed system of food and nutrition security that serves 200 000 subsidized meals per day, markets 45 000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables a year, and actively encourages urban and periurban agriculture.