When unelected representatives pretend to be public policy makers and use their position to see their own ideas put into practice, the door is open to authentic abuses of authority, as happened in Bahian cities from 2018 onwards. program conceived by a promoter of the public ministry gives Bahia (MP-BA) implanted a diet vegancontrary to all the directives of the education management bodies, in schools in impoverished municipalities in the sertão – and the person responsible for the idea just got rid of answering on its own initiative before the National Council of the Public Ministry (CNMP).
In 2018, Letícia Baird created the Escola Sustentável program, with the aim of completely eliminating animal products from the meals offered in municipal schools – not just meat, but even eggs and milk. In other words, schools would go vegan. All in the name of a “more ecological” food proposal, as if the objective of school lunches was to save the planet, instead of providing the child with the nutrients he needs to develop physically and intellectually.
It is not for us here to analyze the nutritional and moral merits of a vegan diet in comparison with one that includes products of animal origin; this is a discussion for nutritionists, physicians and bioethicists. But, in the Brazilian case, the rules of the National Fund for the Development of Education (FNDE) determine the supply of animal protein at least four times a week, which in itself puts the Sustainable School on a collision course with the guidelines of the agency. who is responsible for regulating aspects such as the provision of school lunches. After the case became public, the Regional Council of Nutritionists of Bahia, the Federal Council of Nutritionists and the Brazilian Society of Pediatrics also criticized the program, stressing the importance of “prohibited” foods for child development.
Prosecutor Leticia Baird imposed a public policy, taking advantage of her position as a member of the Public Ministry and using legal instruments that created obligations falsely based on biased and cropped readings of the Federal Constitution.
None of this, however, interested the prosecutor, who used her position as a member of the Public Ministry to impose the program on four Bahian municipalities, as she told the newspaper. Washington Post the then director of the Serrinha School Feeding Council, one of the municipalities used as a “laboratory”. especially symptomatic of modus operandi of the promoter was the use of the Conduct Adjustment Term (TAC) instrument to establish a vegan diet program in the four municipalities. The term “adjustment of conduct” here does not simply refer to something that is already good, but can be improved; in the context of public administration, there is only a need for “conduct adjustment” when there is a patently wrong or irregular conduct, which needs to be immediately stopped and replaced by correct practice. But the offer of meat, milk and eggs in school lunches is not an error or irregularity that requires “adjustment” – on the contrary: it is the strict compliance with the FNDE guidelines. In other words, the authorities who signed such TACs, which provided for a fine and even “civil, administrative and criminal liability, including in the context of liability for collective moral damage” they were implicitly admitting that they were acting against legislation or government regulations by offering animal protein to students, which is evidently not true.
Such managers certainly did not sign the TACs out of any genuine conviction in favor of veganism; most likely, the fear of some liability, perhaps even of a lawsuit for administrative improbity, spoke louder. In the end, the TAC signed by the municipality of Serrinha implied the idea that offering meat to children would be a waste of taxpayers’ money – note, for example, one of the “recitals”, which ties the constitutional principle of efficiency to the fact that the “financial” and “environmental” cost of meat production is “high, notably in terms of water consumption, deforestation practices, high emission of greenhouse gases, in addition to the numerous resulting animal deaths”. And, to eliminate any doubt that Leticia Baird acts guided by this mistaken conviction, there are the prosecutor’s own words, who, sought out in 2019 by the People’s Gazettestated that anyone who disagreed with the vegan menu should eat meat “at home with your money, because here we are talking about a public resource” – adding to the ideological militancy the pure and simple outrage, since these are four poor cities, whose HDIs were among the lowest in Bahia.
It was not, therefore, a program elaborated and presented to municipal managers as a suggestion, which could be freely adopted or refused (as long as it did not violate the FNDE’s determinations), but a true imposition of a public policy, taking advantage of the position as a member of the Public Ministry and using legal instruments that created obligations falsely based on biased and cropped readings of the Federal Constitution. In short, true abuse of authority, provided for in the article 33 of Law 13.869/19, which criminalizes the act of “demanding information or fulfilling an obligation, including the duty to do or not to do it, without express legal support” – as an aggravating factor, the imposition of a vegan diet was not just something “without express legal support”, but also rather an explicit violation of the norms of the national education manager. The CNMP, however, turned a blind eye to all this when it closed the investigation into Leticia Baird’s performance, claiming that the implementation of the program “was not covered by any indication of irregularity or functional lack that legitimizes the performance of the National Council of Public ministry”.
The same CNMP that invents “crimes of opinion” to punish former members of Operation Car Wash, whose real “crime” was to investigate politicians as powerful as they are corrupt, gathering enough evidence for them to end up in jail, sees no problem when a prosecutor that defends animals decides to use its position to turn poor children into ideological guinea pigs, depriving them of foods which they would most likely only have access to at school. A grotesque inversion of values that only encourages other members of the MP to extrapolate their functions and impose their own preferences on managers elected by the people.
