Wholesale food markets play a vital role in connecting producers, intermediaries, retailers, and consumers to sell and buy food, especially fresh products like fruits and vegetables. These institutions are critical in ensuring physical and financial access to fresh and nutritious foods at fair prices — a key aspect of the right to food. Additionally, wholesale markets help to maintain the continuity of the food supply chain, connecting different regions within a country.
Despite the meaningful role that wholesale food markets play in the right to food, the Brazilian wholesale markets fall short of their full potential and must strengthen their capacity to lower food prices. They can do so by reducing transaction costs and aggregating value to products, promoting business intelligence, and coordinating among wholesale market operations and integration with other food policies.
Recognizing this need, the Brazilian Federal Government published the Decree No. 11.820 in 2023, which established the National Food Supply Policy (PNAAB, in Portuguese) as a part of the Brazil Without Hunger Plan. This policy positions food supply as a central priority, aiming to promote coordinated national efforts to advance sustainable and regular access to healthy food. As part of the approach, wholesale markets were assigned as one of the PNAAB’s instruments, with the key goals of expanding, modernizing, and revitalizing them. This approach also focuses on integrating food supply equipment and local development.
However, this institutional reform is likely to face legal and political challenges. Drawing on previous research from the author’s graduate thesis on the legal regime of Ceagesp and the supermarket chains in food supply activities, this Expert Column argues that the disaggregation of Brazilian public wholesale markets — known as Ceasas (Centrais Públicas de Abastecimento Alimentar, in Portuguese) — paired with the lack of public investment and past privatization efforts, has reinforced a path dependence. Consequently, these factors have hampered meaningful institutional reform; to counter their impacts, the Brazilian government must invest resources and personnel to effectively implement PNAAB’s goal of public wholesale markets.
Addressing the challenges of institutional reforms is critical to not only fulfilling the PNAAB’s objectives but also aligning Brazilian public wholesale food markets with the new political and economic landscape. Created in the 1960s by Brazil’s military dictatorship, Ceasas was defined by a strict non-democratic institutional context that differs from the needs and configurations of today. This Expert Column will explore the historical factors that have reinforced institutional path dependence and how changes in the political economy shape expectations for the performance of public wholesale food markets.
A Brief History of Brazilian Public Wholesale Food Markets
In the 1960s, the Brazilian government began implementing actions and policies to coordinate and ensure food supply in cities, recognizing it as a matter of national security and essential to economic development. At the time, Brazil’s military dictatorship had a strong capacity for intervention, allowing it to effectively advance its agenda.
One of the food supply policies created was the National System of Wholesale Markets in 1972 (SINAC, in Portuguese) (Decree No. 70.502), which centralized horticultural activities, shared technical information, set parameters and technical norms, and empowered people involved in these activities. Within SINAC, the Executive Group of Supply’s System Modernization was created to implement the construction of wholesale markets in the country’s major cities, with mixed capital from federal, state, and local governments.
The 1980s brought forward re-democratization, globalization, and neoliberalism, alongside a fiscal crisis — marking a turning point in Brazil’s perspective of its role in food supply. These changes reflected a new political economy that impacted other public policy fields. As a result, the government stopped investing in food supply institutions, transferred the capital of wholesale markets to states and local governments, and dismantled SINAC. The latter symbolized the end of public investment, resulting in the disorganization and discoordination of the horticultural sector and the lack of public regulation in food supply activities.
These actions embodied the new perception that the government should not intervene directly in food supply activities; it should only be a supervisor. For instance, the government attempted to privatize Ceagesp, the largest wholesale food market in Brazil and a national benchmark for commercialization and wholesale activities. Ceagesp remained part of Brazil’s privatization program between 1998 and 2015, and again from 2019 to 2024 — preventing the company from gathering funds and investing in its modernization.
Today, after the shortcomings of neoliberal reforms and the exhaustion of Brazil’s hegemonic food system model, a new political economy has since emerged. The New Activist State involves a State that is more actively engaged in economic activities and is open to different relationships with the private sector to promote shared social, economic, and political goals. Concerning wholesale markets, this new framework requires Ceasas to fulfill its food supply role by prioritizing public interests when promoting physical and financial access to healthy foods. In addition, it also requires having Ceasas legal configuration as a public company with state capital and governance. Moreover, Ceasas is required to promote democratic components in its governance, such as social participation, which would complement the existing federal participative council, the National Council for Food Security and Nutrition (CONSEA, in Portuguese).
Despite this renewed framework, institutional improvements have lagged in recent decades. Wholesale markets were kept aside from government priorities, and, until the PNAAB in 2023, Brazil had not implemented a national food supply policy.
Path Dependence Challenges to Institutional Reform
The history of Brazilian public wholesale food markets reveals several factors that have contributed to institutional path dependence. These factors include the dismantling of SINAC, the lack of public investment and national food supply policy since the 1980s, the prolonged efforts to privatize Ceasas, and decades of public neoliberal discourse discrediting and weakening the wholesale food market’s important role in promoting the right to food.
Consequently, these barriers have made it harder for governments to promote coordination amongst wholesale markets with different government capital controls. They also hinder them from reinforcing the New State Activism perception, which asserts that public ownership of wholesale food markets is necessary to promote the right to food aligned with public interests, especially in the context of worrying levels of food insecurity in Brazil. Additionally, these factors make it more difficult for the government to promote democratic participation in Ceasas’ activities, as well as invest the amount of money and political effort needed to overcome decades of institutional setbacks.
However, these challenges are not insurmountable. Political and economic engagement in promoting reforms is key to effectively advancing modernization and strengthening wholesale food market structures, as intended by PNAAB. In this regard, the creation of PNAAB is already a notable milestone in public food supply — signaling the country’s concrete step forward in ensuring better physical and financial access to healthy foods for the Brazilian population.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the O’Neill Institute.
