Hello fine folks of the interwebs–
It’s been pretty much nothing but reposts for months now here on Agroecopeople. I have been focusing on finishing a fairly major project! That is, my (first?) book, Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond, due out this December from University of California Press! Based on my research in Belo Horizonte, Brazil over the past 15 years, the book presents BH’s story.
From the official summary at UC Press, Belo Horizonte
“is home to 2.5 million people and one of the world’s most successful city food security programs. Since its Municipal Secretariat for Food Security was founded in 1993, malnutrition in Belo Horizonte has declined dramatically, allowing it to serve as an inspiration for Brazil’s renowned Zero Hunger programs. The Municipal Secretariat’s work with local small family farmers also offers a glimpse of how food security, rural livelihoods, and healthy ecosystems can be supported together. While inevitably imperfect, Belo Horizonte offers a vision of the path away from food system dysfunction, unsustainability, and hunger. This case study shows the vital importance of holistic approaches to food security, offers ideas on how to design successful policies to end hunger, and lays out strategies for how to make policy change happen. With these tools, we can take the next steps towards achieving similar reductions in hunger and food insecurity elsewhere in the developed and developing worlds.”
Beginning to End Hunger is available for pre-order from UC Press, and also from the various normal outlets!
A paper co-written by several of the erstwhile Chappell lab crew on the (possible) biodiversity effects of Belo Horizonte’s food security programs was published last year in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (author’s copy available on ResearchGate here.)
And you can learn more about Belo Horizonte’s stories from several other sources, including fantastic work by my mentor Cecilia Rocha of Ryerson University and colleagues (e.g. here, here, and here); and several videos on YouTube (for example, a brief documentary based on Belo Horizonte’s win of the Future Policy Award, and another one put together a bit back by my friend and colleague, Lindsay Smith).
I hope to visit a number of cities next year to talk about the book; feel free to comment or otherwise contact me to let me know if you’d like me to visit where you are!
Beginning to End Hunger 
Reblogged this on Ideas for Sustainability and commented:
Jahi Chappell’s new book is out, and he introduces it on his blog — which I reproduced here. Likely to be of interest to a number of readers of ideas4sustainability, too!