Deficiencies in the government procurement process of the National School Feeding Program and its impacts on local development

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the problems in the food purchasing process in the National Program of School Nutrition – PNAE. The focus of the analysis is the implementation phase of the program, in which distortions take place between the current legislation relating the acquisition of food and the local context and difficulties in performing the governmental purchases of food. The methodologies used consist of Documental Analysis, taking as corpus the Municipal Inspection Reports, elaborated by the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU). A total of 108 reports were analyzed comprising municipalities in the North and Northeast regions. Among the results found in this study, it was possible to notice the existence of legal gaps, mainly in the formulation of the current legislation on the subject, once it lacks considering the limitations and diversity of local contexts. In the process of controlling and supervising the process of government purchases - which is conducted at municipal or regional level - the general rules are often disregarded either due to formal failures related to high bureaucracy or to the search for illicit enrichment. As a conclusion, it was observed that such distortions weaken the positive results for the beneficiaries of the program and for the local development proposed by the legislation that promotes government purchases.