ORIGINAL PAPER The politics of the internationalisation of Brazil’s ‘Zero Hunger’ instruments Carolina Milhorance 1 & Marcel Bursztyn 1 & Eric Sabourin 2 Received: 20 December 2017 / Accepted: 15 January 2019 # International Society for Plant Pathology and Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract Brazil became a prominent player for policy dialogue on food security and social protection in the 2000s and started to share its policy instruments with developing countries. However, the consequences as well as the mechanisms of such political effort have been little analysed. This paper draws on the case of Mozambique to examine the adoption process of Brazil’ s instruments of public food procurement from family farmers and home-grown school feeding. It shows that despite political and institutional constraints at the national level to adopting the initiatives in Mozambique, local actors managed to adapt them to their contexts. It aims to contribute to recent policy transfer literature, which is particularly interested in the role of ‘translation’ mechanisms in the circulation of policy ideas and practices across nations. Keywords South–South cooperation . Policy translation . Policy transfer . Brazil . Mozambique . Food security 1 Introduction Brazil’ s foreign policy in the 2000s and early 2010s relied on the narrative that the country was well placed to propose de- velopment solutions formed by its own experiences (ABC/ MRE 2013). Under the Lula da Silva administration (2003– 2010), a food security system was built, based upon state intervention, public credit, and other policies aiming to strengthen internal markets, which was particularly appealing to the international community during the international food crisis of 2007–08 (Pierri 2013). The Zero Hunger strategy is one of the country’ s most internationally recognised experi- ments and became an object of experience-sharing with Latin American and African countries (Costa Leite et al. 2013). Numerous international institutions, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and civil society organisations such as ActionAid and Oxfam, praised the country’ s approach to fighting hunger and poverty (Fraundorfer 2013). The then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, launched the ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’, a global call to action, at the Rio + 20 Summit in 2012. The election of José Graziano da Silva, former head of the Zero Hunger strategy in Brazil, to the directorship of the FAO represented another strong symbol of the high esteem in which this experiment was held. The global recognition endowed Brazil with credentials to become a prominent actor for policy dialogue and cooperation on food security and social protection (Costa Leite et al. 2013; Pierri 2013). However, the effects at the local level as well as the mech- anisms of such political effort have been little analysed. Hence, this paper draws on the case of Mozambique to examine the process and the consequences of the adoption of Brazil’ s policy instruments. Two components of this strategy – the Food Acquisition Programme (PAA) and the School Feeding Programme (PNAE) – became the main channels for sharing this experience with developing countries, particularly on the African continent. This article focuses on the adoption process of these two initiatives in Mozambique through a review of government documents and empirical data, based on observant participation at the FAO office in Mozambique and 240 semi- structured interviews with diplomats, policymakers, business representatives, civil society organisations, and farmers’ asso- ciations in Brazil, Mozambique, and in the FAO’ s headquarters in Italy between 2013 and 2015. * Carolina Milhorance cmilhorance@gmail.com 1 Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Brasilia, Brasília, Brazil 2 French Centre for Agricultural Research and Development (CIRAD), Montpellier, France Food Security https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-019-00898-y