Local Food Systems and Community Economic Development

R. David Lamie, Steven C. Deller, R. David Lamie, Steven C. Deller

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000059724
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias físicas
• Categoría: Geografía

Local Food Systems and Community Economic Development provides scholarly and practical knowledge on a range of issues often associated with local food system development.

Many people agree that there are unintended consequences associated with the manner in which our food supply chain has evolved. These concerns range in focus from health, to environment, to economic structure, to social justice. But, for each argument critical of our current food system, there are to be found strong counter-arguments; the popular press is replete with stories that lean toward taking specific sides in these arguments, often demonizing those on the other side. In this volume local food scholars strive to be fair, balanced, and as factual as possible in their arguments. This even-handed approach is appropriate as it should foster more sustainable community change and should lead us toward a stronger foundation for scholarly inquiry and ultimately more respect and credibility for efforts to better understand the phenomenon of local and regional food system development.

Amidst a deepening interest in local food systems as a community economic development strategy, Local Food Systems and Community Economic Development will be of great interest to scholars of community development, rural studies, agriculture, food systems, and rural economy. The chapters originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

Local foods systems and community economic development

Steven C. Deller, David Lamie, and Maureen Stickel

ABSTRACT
Local food system development is a popular strategy employed by many communities in the pursuit of sustainable and equitable economic growth and development. This often includes a range of economic projects including farmers markets, community supported agriculture enterprises, urban farming/agriculture projects, and food hubs. Sometimes it includes intermediated marketing channels like grocery stores and broad-line distributors interested in providing local foods. Despite growing prominence in the policy arena, many of the presumptions of the local food movement remain largely untested. This review provides critical analysis of current research on local and regional food networks and reveals that much of this research currently lacks strong theoretical grounding and quantitative rigor. As community development practitioners and planners play an important role in food system design, organization, policy, and implementation in an effort to produce community or regional wellbeing, it is important for them to distinguish between objective, research-based information and speculative, advocacy-oriented analysis.

Introduction

Fostering local and regional food systems has become a popular focus of community and economic development strategy employed by communities across the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Local food systems are typified by small scale, localized production with direct-to-consumer sales though mechanisms such as farmers markets or Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) enterprises and increasingly intermediated sales to local grocery retailers, restaurants, and institutions such as schools, hospitals, and even jails. Producers, especially smaller ones, however, often find it daunting to manage moves into these larger intermediated sales markets. This is troublesome because much of the growth potential in local foods systems is in these latter markets. Thus, a somewhat novel intermediary entity, food hubs, are being developed across the country in regions where there is a sufficient number of smaller farms in reasonable proximity to final markets and a desire to intentionally maintain local supply chains with local products not co-mingled with products from afar (Matson & Thayer, 2016).

The growth in local food systems over the past few decades, both in terms of relative size and interest from a policy perspective at the local level, has been impressive. The dollar value of direct sales from farmers to consumers has grown substantially from about $400 million in 1992 to almost $1.3 billion in 2012, and the number of farmers reporting direct sales increased from about 40,000 to over 140,000 over the same time period (Figure 1). The number of farmers markets grew from 1755 in 1994 to 5274 in 2009 (Martinez et al., 2010) and to 8268 in 2014 (Low et al., 2015), an increase of 371% over 21 years (over 16% average annually), and the rate of growth in demand for farmers markets is likely increasing, with the number of communities wanting to support farmers markets often outstripping the number of farmers able to fill them. The number of CSA enterprises grew from 2 in 1986 to 12,617 in 2012, indicating a truly remarkable rate of growth from this new business model (Martinez et al., 2010). The number of dedicated local food distributors, brokers, and aggregators intentionally serving these local foods marketing channels (food hub) increased by 288% between 2007 and 2014, to a total of 302 (Low et al., 2015). While farm to school programs have multiple objects, such as teaching youth about nutrition and the origins of their food, the latest census of these programs (2011–2012 or 2012–2013 school years) revealed some 4300 schools have some form of program in place, an increase of 430% over levels in 2006 (Low et al., 2015; Ralston & Benson, 2015). Many of these programs are now adapting their model to reach new institutional markets like daycare centers, healthcare facilities, prisons, and corporate commissaries. Many are experimenting with hybrid models that incorporate some elements from food hubs, CSAs, and farm to school approaches, indicating that the future will hold a plentiful array of new models (Woods, Ernst, & Tropp, 2017).

Figure 1. Patterns in direct sales (local foods).

The importance of localized food production and consumption is presented across an increasingly large literature from a variety of perspectives and academic disciplines. Early work on local food systems came mostly from the social sciences including anthropology, rural sociology, and community development (Hendrickson, 2009; Holt & Amilien, 2007). Much of this work focused on the fundamental interest in the ways food is produced, processed, and stored, and the manner in which it is shared within a particular cultural context. This work laid down important foundations of the deeper cultural aspects of food that arguably underlie much of the current interest in local food systems. In addition this work is likely also the reservoir that might feed motivations for changing any given food system to be more congruent with what is truly desired. The literature review, based on a graduate student seminar at UC-Davis, provides a rather comprehensive review and synthesis of these earlier works (Campbell, Carlisle-Cummins, & Feenstra, 2013).

This earlier literature reveals that many authors view the development of a local food industry as at least a partial antidote for a range of societal ills. These societal ills include unhealthy lifestyles and diets, ecologically unsustainable production, withering social capital, food insecurity, and asymmetric economic growth and political power (e.g. Carson, Hamel, Giarrocco, Baylor, & Mathews, 2016). Telligman, Worosz, and Bratcher (2017) note that consumer interest in local and regional foods is connected to socially defined food criteria including improved environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Some, such as Christensen and Phillips (2016), argue that the promotion of local food systems is actually a convergence of community development and economic development efforts and takes on a holistic view of the community. Whether or not one agrees with the arguments advanced by local food advocates, it is clear from the literature that the theoretical frameworks and rigorous analytical testing necessary to support the curative claims is currently lacking and only recently being undertaken in a serious manner. If communities are to pursue policies related to the promotion of local food systems, it is important that these policies be based on a solid research foundation and not merely anecdotal evidence, especially if they are considering large investments of financial, human, or political capital.

In this essay we seek to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of what we know, and do not know, in the local foods research in order to encourage more thoughtful consideration and strategic planning before communities make investments in local food system infrastructure. In conducting this review, we focus on local foods’ impact on socioeconomic indicators of a community by reviewing literature from the period 2000–2017. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the range of work on local food systems, literature from nearly all disciplines could apply (e.g. Pinchot, 2014). In our work, we mostly confined our review to articles from economics, sociology, planning, health, and community and rural development. We also confined our investigation of local foods to the developed country context of the United States, Canada, and Europe.¹

We begin our analysis by discussing how local and regional foods are conceptualized and defined. We then build on our simple descriptive discussion of the growth in local and regional foods and provide some background on the nature of that growth. Next, the local foods literature can be organized in terms of local foods’ impact on health, food security, economic development, producer behavior, social capital, and consumer behavior. Within each category, the current literature will be summarized. While the lines between categories often blur, it will be seen that, though much good work has been done, there is a need for more rigorous research. Each phase of our review is undertaken with an eye toward policies, programs, and practices aimed at fostering community and/or economic development.

Defining and describing local foods

A common limitation throughout the literature on local foods is the lack of a standard definition for what constitutes “local” (Cranfield, Henson, & Blandon, 2012). Many authors cite the persistence of subjectivity when it comes to distinguishing between local and nonlocal production and consumption because it is an inherently relative concept. Goodman (2013) explains that food changes based on the context of other ideas, supporting the inability to nail down a specific definition of “local food.” McFadden (2015) also highlights the lack of a standard definition. She discusses how a range of attributes such as geography, production practices, business size, and supply chain length play into food being categorized as “local.” Thus “local food” can encompass a range of geographic definitions from neighborhood gardens to municipal markets to statewide production (Telligman et al., 2017). This lack of a precise definition of what defines “local” or even “regional” makes any rigorous quantitative analysis of these food systems difficult if not impossible. McCaffrey and Kurland (2014) note that the ambiguity around defining local foods leads to authors and practitioners employing many different definitions of “local” tailored to the primary focus of their work. Thus, the lack of consistent findings about how local or regional food systems impact local communities may be attributable to the lack of an agreed upon definition.

From a practical strategic community action context, however, the precise definition of “local” is less important than movement in the direction of becoming “more local than before,” except for decisions about which local governments, organizations, and individuals to involve in their efforts. Community development practitioners have often spent considerable time working with community actors precisely defining terms like “livability,” “quality of life,” or “local foods,” but inevitably find that they must move to action prior to achieving a precise definition. Thus, we can face two competing challenges: a working definition that meets the needs of practical-minded community development practitioners, and a more refined definition that allows us to move our research based understanding of local food systems forward.

Building on McFadden (2015), perhaps a clearer manifestation of “local” appears in the style of production and consumption within the local foods movement. Sundbo’s (2013) consumer and producer survey analysis supports this approach despite the ambiguity around the term “local”: consumers and producers are demonstrated to have similar ideas as to what constitutes local food. The perception of what defines local foods tends to center on production and purchasing characteristics such as small-scale production and direct to consumer sales mechanisms. These mechanisms include farmers markets, farm stands, and CSAs where customers can connect most directly to a food source. Alternatively, local and regional foods could be generalized as being produced using sustainable production methods and distributed to consumers via shorter supply chains (Bowen & Mutersbaugh, 2014; Garnett, 2013; Hinrichs, 2000; Jarosz, 2008; McFadden, 2015; Sundbo, 2013; Woods, 2012). This focus on shorter supply-chains, both on the input and marketing side, points to the importance of geographical proximity.

A relatively new concept in the local food system arena is the concept of the food value chain (Bloom & Hinrichs, 2011; Diamond et al., 2014). Food value chains are, in essence, supply chains where there is agreement on a particular set of common values that provide a sense of equitable support for each level of the system from producer through final distribution to consumers. The idea is to create value through the transparent delivery of information (the “story”) about the individuals involved in the process of producing and delivering the food product to the consumer. A key is emphasizing how each individual is appreciated for the value they add and how they are fairly compensated for their contributions. Consumers who identify with the “story” are thought to be willing to pay more for a product when they know that the proceeds from the sale are distributed equitably.

Farmers markets, CSA enterprises, and other direct to consumer supply mechanisms do not give a full picture of the local and regional food market. As the local foods industry has developed, other entities such as micro-food processers (typically firms with less than five employees) and food hubs have also grown in importance. These entities allow for more coordinated distribution schemes with a wider array of product offerings (Barham et al., 2012; Cleveland, Muller, Tranovick, Mazaroli, & Hinson, 2014; Matson, Sullins, & Cook, 2013; O’Hara, 2017).² The growth of these mechanisms points to a role for what Low and Vogel (2011) dub “intermediate sales.” These products reach consumers indirectly via sales to entities such as restaurants, hospitals, and jails or to more traditional retail outlets such as supermarkets. Data limitations have constrained the study of these channels, leaving us to case studies of what are often pilot programs. One example would be the study from Maryland that investigates local foods’ integration in area school systems (Oberholtzer, Hanson, Brust, Dimitri, & Richman, 2012). Further, as the farms associated with this type of activity tend to be larger and more regionally focused, the lines begin to blur as to what should be counted as “local foods” (Low et al., 2015).

In order to be considered authentically “local,” product sold through intermediated market channels requires a “traceability” system that insures the source of local products through the supply chain. This adds cost to the product and most aggregators or wholesalers and distributors have not seen the need since they are generally focu...