Impactos do programa de aquisição de alimentos sobre a produção dos agricultores familiares

The Brazilian public food procurement program PAA is a federal government policy created to encourage family farming and fight food and nutritional insecurity of people in social vulnerability. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of PAA on the income and diversity of family farmers' production in the main modality of the program: purchase with simultaneous donation (CDS). To this end, we used the empirical difference-in-differences strategy combined with the Entropy Balancing technique, using microdata from PAA's administrative purchasing records and data on the level of agrarian family units from the DAP registry for the period from 2009 to 2017. We found that PAA-CDS contributed to the average increase in income by 13.2%, benefiting the poorest farmers in greater magnitude, and an increase of 56.8% was observed for farmers in the 10th income amount. Regarding the diversity of production, a significant positive impact of the program was found on the diversity index and the number of products, as well as a reduction in specialization and dependence on income from a single product. These results indicate that the design of the program is suitable for its purposes and that it is effective in its objective of supporting family farming production and combating food and nutritional insecurity in the country