Compounding crises of economic recession and food insecurity: a comparative study of three low-income communities in Santa Barbara County

Santa Barbara County exhibits some of the highest rates of food insecurity in California, as well as in the United States. Through ethnographic research of three low-income, predominantly Latino communities in Santa Barbara County, this study examined the degree to which households had been experiencing heightened levels of food insecurity since the economic recession and ensuing coping strategies, including gender-specific repercussions and coping strategies. Methods included administering a survey with 150 households and conducting observation and unstructured interviews at various local food-centered venues. Results indicated that households from the three communities were experiencing heightened levels of food insecurity and that all three communities were employing diversification of procurement, adjustments to a reduced or limited food budget, reliance on food assistance, and revitalization of the home as a site of domestic food production and preparation as coping strategies. The results also suggested that women suffered disproportionately higher psychological and physical costs associated with compounding crises. In conclusion, the experiences narrated by low-income households reflect a form of citizenship that appears compromised by a host of variables perceived to exist outside the realm of local control. Shifting toward an operational framework of food sovereignty may allow these communities to become more resilient in the face of future political, environmental, social, and economic stressors.     

Reweaving the food security safety net: Mediating entitlement and entrepreneurship

The American food system has produced both abundance and food insecurity, with production and consumption dealt with as separate issues. The new approach of community food security (CFS) seeks to re-link production and consumption, with the goal of ensuring both an adequate and accessible food supply in the present and the future. In its focus on consumption, CFS has prioritized the needs of low-income people; in its focus on production, it emphasizes local and regional food systems. These objectives are not necessarily compatible and may even be contradictory. This article describes the approach of community food security and raises some questions about how the movement can meet its goals of simultaneously meeting the food needs of low-income people and developing local food systems. It explores the conceptual and political promise and pitfalls of local, community-based approaches to food security and examines alternative economic strategies such as urban agriculture and community-supported agriculture. It concludes that community food security efforts are important additions to, but not subsitutes for, a nonretractable governmental safety net that protects against food insecurity.     

The rise of food banks and the challenge of matching food assistance with potential need: towards a spatially specific,rapid assessment approach

In the United States, food banks served an estimated 46 million people in 2015. A combination of government policy reforms and political economic trends contributed to the rising numbers of individuals relying on private food assistance in the US, the United Kingdom and other high-income countries. Although researchers frequently map urban food environments, this project is one of the first to map private food assistance and potential need at the census-tract scale. We utilize Geographic Information Systems, demographic data, and food assistance locations to develop a rapid assessment tool that could support food banks, pantries, soup kitchens, and government agencies that seek to answer the question of whether people with the greatest need have food distribution sites in close proximity. We define access based on distance and then calculate potential food insecurity using either poverty rates or a food insecurity index. We apply these methods in a case study analysis of Santa Clara County, California. Our findings suggest that food assistance distribution locations match the areas of potential need in more than 80% of urban census tracts. However, there are several potentially underserved locations and populations that could benefit from new food assistance operations. The poverty and index-based approaches show significant spatial overlap in mapped areas of high food insecurity and low access. The poverty only approach produces a higher estimate of food insecurity rates, is easier to calculate, and draws attention to the need to address poverty as a root cause of hunger.     

食物安全测量指标比较与影响因素分析

为探究农户饮食多样性得分和食物消费得分2种食物安全测量指标的差异以及影响食物安全的因素,采用陕西省镇安县、洛南县,云南省武定县、会泽县和贵州省盘县、正安县2015年1 368户农户实地调研数据,并运用Logit模型进行影响因素实证分析。研究结果表明:1)农户饮食多样性得分和食物消费得分的相关性较高,但从定义、测量方法到结果都有差异,饮食多样性得分的食物消费追溯期短,获取的食物消费情况更准确,而食物消费得分设定不同的食物种类权重更能识别真正食物不安全人群;2)家里有婴幼儿、劳动力平均受教育年限、家庭人均年收入、家里养殖牲畜对农户食物安全具有显著的正向影响。基于以上分析,食物安全评估和测量指标应该根据不同的需要进行选取,且在减贫的同时应关注贫困地区农户的食物获取能力以减轻农户食物不安全的状况。     

You can know your school and feed it too: Vermont farmers’ motivations and distribution practices in direct sales to school food services

Farm to School (FTS) programs are increasingly popular as methods to teach students about food, nutrition, and agriculture by connecting students with the sources of the food that they eat. They may also provide opportunity for farmers seeking to diversify market channels. Food service buyers in FTS programs often choose to procure food for school meals directly from farmers. The distribution practices required for such direct procurement often bring significant transaction costs for both school food service professionals and farmers. Analysis of data from a survey of Vermont farmers who sell directly to school food services explores farmers’ motivations and distribution practices in these partnerships. A two-step cluster analysis procedure characterizes farmers’ motivations along a continuum between market-based and socially embedded values. Further bivariate analysis shows that farmers who are motivated most by market-based values are significantly associated with distribution practices that facilitate sales to school food services. Implications for technical assistance to facilitate these sales are discussed.     

Including growers in the “food safety” conversation: enhancing the design and implementation of food safety programming based on farm and marketing needs of fresh fruit and vegetable producers

Experts identified water quality, manure, good handling practices (including personal hygiene and equipment sanitation), and traceability as critical farm problem areas that, if addressed, are likely to decrease risk associated with microbial contamination of fresh produce from all scales of agriculture. However, the diverse nature of production strategies used by produce farmers presents multiple options for addressing foodborne illness issues while simultaneously creating potential complications. We use a mental models methodology to enhance our understanding of the underlying factors and assumptions of small, medium, and large produce growers that influence their decision-making processes for contamination prevention and control. This empirical evidence demonstrates how challenges and opportunities to food safety are related to the scale of production and marketing strategies. We believe that refining the development of standards and existing extension and outreach food safety programs are important to both consumer protection and supporting agricultural communities. Additionally, this approach will help develop and refine food safety programs that will result in empirically grounded recommendations based on identified grower information needs.     

The development of guidelines for implementing information technology to promote food security

Food insecurity, and its extreme form, hunger, occur whenever the accessibility to an adequate supply of nutritional and safe foods becomes restricted or unpredictable. They are recurring problems in certain regions of the US, as well as in many parts of the world. According to nation-wide surveys conducted by the US Bureau of the Census, between 1996 and 1998 an estimated 9.7% of US households were classified as food insecure (6.2% being food insecure without evidence of hunger, and 3.5% being food insecure with moderate to severe hunger). This means that approximately 10 million households each year did not always have access to enough food to meet basic needs. A potential tool in the fight against food insecurity and hunger is information technology (IT), since its use and range of application continue to grow at astonishing rates. The study presented here examined the question of how information technology, particularly the Internet, can be used to promote food security. The study used an action science research approach, and a case study strategy, with the food security system of Oktibbeha County, Mississippi selected as the case for study. The research design was a two-phase process. Phase one consisted of a needs assessment among food assistance organizations in Oktibbeha County, and included interviews of key food assistance personnel. Phase one also included a survey of IT subject matter experts to seek their opinions about the current state of Web-based information technology. Phase two involved an analysis of various IT implementation issues, as well as the development of a Web-based food security information system prototype tool. The needs assessment results indicated that (a) certain food security system and information needs existed among the food assistance organizations in Oktibbeha County, and (b) appropriate information technologies existed that could be applied to these needs. The food security needs related to better communication and coordination of information, such as program information, food site inventory information, client history information, food donation information, and nutrition education information. In regard to technology development, a variety of scenarios were examined. These included client-side approaches, server-side approaches, simple e-mail-based systems, Java-based systems, systems based on the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and commercial database systems. In applying the needs assessment and survey results, the researcher developed a prototype Web site (including a series of online database tools) that could be used to promote food security in counties such as Oktibbeha County. The results of this research show that appropriate, Internet-based, IT holds promise for the reduction of certain social problems, such as food insecurity and hunger.     

Contributing to food security in urban areas: differences between urban agriculture and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North

Food security is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in the Global North, especially in urban areas. Because such areas do not always have good access to nutritionally adequate food, the question of how to supply them is an urgent priority in order to maintain a healthy population. Urban and peri-urban agriculture, as sources of local fresh food, could play an important role. Whereas some scholars do not differentiate between peri-urban and urban agriculture, seeing them as a single entity, our hypothesis is that they are distinct, and that this has important consequences for food security and other issues. This has knock-on effects for food system planning and has not yet been appropriately analysed. The objectives of this study are to provide a systematic understanding of urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North, showing their similarities and differences, and to analyse their impact on urban food security. To this end, an extensive literature review was conducted, resulting in the identification and comparison of their spatial, ecological and socio-economic characteristics. The findings are discussed in terms of their impact on food security in relation to the four levels of the food system: food production, processing, distribution and consumption. The results show that urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global North indeed differ in most of their characteristics and consequently also in their ability to meet the food needs of urban inhabitants. While urban agriculture still meets food needs mainly at the household level, peri-urban agriculture can provide larger quantities and has broader distribution pathways, giving it a separate status in terms of food security. Nevertheless, both possess (unused) potential, making them valuable for urban food planning, and both face similar threats regarding urbanisation pressures, necessitating adequate planning measures.     

The emergence and framing of farm-to-school initiatives: civic engagement, health and local agriculture

Interest in and initiation of farm-to-school (FTS) programs have increased in recent years, spurred on by converging public concerns about child obesity trends and risks associated with industrialization and distancing in the modern food system. A civic agriculture framework that more specifically considers civic engagement and problem solving offers insights about variations in the development and prospects for FTS programs. Drawing on comparative case studies of two emerging FTS initiatives in Pennsylvania—one in a rural setting and one in an urban setting—this article examines the role of internal and external “champions” in launching FTS programs and fostering civic engagement. Farm-to-school community stakeholders across the two cases framed FTS in broadly similar terms of (1) redressing poor food environments; (2) improving student nutrition, health and well-being; and (3) revitalizing rural community through support of local agriculture. However, specific concerns and emphases differed across the rural and urban cases, illustrating the significance of local context for such programs. The article concludes by discussing the importance of frame bridging and frame extension as strategies for expanding the FTS movement, and also ensuring programs that correspond to the specific circumstances and possibilities of their social and geographic settings.     

Discomforting comfort foods: stirring the pot on Kraft Dinner<Superscript>®</Superscript> and social inequality in Canada

This paper contrasts the perceptions of Canadians who are food-secure with the perceptions of Canadians who are food-insecure through the different meanings that they ascribe to a popular food product known as Kraft Dinner^®. Data sources included individual interviews, focus group interviews, and newspaper articles. Our thematic analysis shows that food-secure Canadians tend to associate Kraft Dinner^® with comfort, while food-insecure Canadians tend to associate Kraft Dinner^® with discomfort. These differences in perspective partly stem from the fact that Kraft Dinner^® consumption by food-secure Canadians is voluntary whereas Kraft Dinner^® consumption by food-insecure Canadians frequently is obligatory. These differences are magnified by the fact that food-insecure individuals are frequently obliged to consume Kraft Dinner^® that has been prepared without milk, a fact that is outside the experience of, and unappreciated by, people who are food-secure. The food-secure perspective influences responses to food insecurity, as Kraft Dinner^® is commonly donated by food-secure people to food banks and other food relief projects. Ignorance among food-secure people of what it is like to be food-insecure, we conclude, partly accounts for the perpetuation of local food charity as the dominant response to food insecurity in Canada.     

世界粮食不安全现状、影响因素及趋势分析

世界粮食供需基本处于紧平衡状态,但区域不平衡特征明显,一些地区粮食短缺现象依然严重。2000年以来世界饥饿人口数量下降趋势明显,但近期呈现反弹迹象,撒哈拉以南非洲等发展中地区形势严峻。总体来看,有效需求不足是造成世界粮食不安全的重要因素,贸易在全球粮食供应量中的占比较小,无法从根本上解决粮食安全问题。世界粮食生产潜力有条件满足未来粮食消费的有效需求,但受冲突、气候变化等多种因素叠加影响,世界粮食安全形势仍将长期面临多重不利因素的持续挑战。     

Paths out of poverty: An eclectic and idiosyncratic review of analytical approaches

This paper briefly reviews different debates about approaches for paths out of poverty, considering several views, from the analysis of specific policies to more general or systemic considerations. The contribution of this paper is to present a broad outline of those debates and to serve as an illustration of the complexity of analyzing paths out of poverty. It discusses in sequence, the more microeconomic approach of evaluation of individual policies for poverty alleviation; then it moves to broader issues of growth and development strategies, and macroeconomic policies, and their links to the persistence or reduction of poverty; and finally discusses the topic of institutions, related to how policy decisions are made and enforced in societies at the previous three levels. Finally, the concluding section argues that a successful program to eliminate poverty must integrate all levels of individual policies, macroeconomic programs, development strategies and good institutions. This paper hopes to contribute to that crucial work.     

基于《食品安全法》指引的粮油监测质量控制

随着近年来我国食品安全问题的日益突出,2009年《食品安全法》经审议通过并实施,由此开创了食品安全监测工作的新局面。本文以粮油食品为例,首先介绍《食品安全法》对粮油监测工作的指引,然后论述对粮油监测质量控制应遵循的方向,并提出具体的控制举措。     

Building Community Capacity through Enhanced Collaboration in the Farmers Market Nutrition Program

The Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) is a federal-state partnership designed to provide fresh, locally grown produce to low-income participants at nutritional risk and expand consumer awareness and use of local produce sold at farmers markets. This paper describes the results of a collaboration initiative based on the typology of a “comprehensive, multisectorial collaboration” to support the FMNP. We report the outcomes of the partnerships that developed over three years, including increased outreach to FMNP participants and strategies to decrease barriers to participation. Those partnerships that reached higher degrees of coordination or collaboration are now addressing market accessibility and market quality in new ways. Those partnerships that exhibited the highest degree of collaboration are contributing to community capacity building beyond FMNP issues per se and to larger issues affecting the agriculture community and the food security of residents. Jamie S. Dollahite, PhD, RD, is an associate professor of Community Nutrition. She leads the Food and Nutrition Education in Communities programs, including Cornell Cooperative Extension’s role in the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which provide outreach to and conduct research with limited resource audiences across New York State. Janet A. Nelson, MS Ed, is an Extension associate in Community Nutrition. Since 1999 she has coordinated Cornell Cooperative Extension’s role in the New York State Farmers Market Nutrition Program. For the preceding five years, Janet was Rural and Community Nutrition Educator for Cornell Cooperative Extension of Oswego County where she facilitated Extension’s relationship with the NYS-FMNP at the county level. Edward A. Frongillo, PhD, is an associate professor of Community and International Nutrition. His work includes the evaluation of program enhancements for the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, as well as studying the impact of nutrition programs for elders on food security, dietary intake, and nutritional status. Matthew Griffin, MS, is the Nutrition Resource Manager at the Food Bank of the Southern Tier, Elmira, New York where he coordinates nutrition, food safety, and community food security programs in connection with emergency food relief organizations.     

Get real: an analysis of student preference for real food

The Real Food Challenge is a national student movement in the United States (U.S.) that aims to shift $1 billion—roughly 20%—of college and university food budgets across the country towards local, ecologically sound, fair, and humane food sources—what they call “real” food—by 2020. The University of Vermont (UVM) was the fifth university in the U.S. to sign the Real Food Campus Commitment, pledging to shift at least 20% of its own food budget towards “real” food by 2020. In order to examine student preference for “real” food on the UVM campus, we analyzed a survey of 904 undergraduate students that used contingent valuation to evaluate students’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the “real” attribute. We found that a majority of students are willing to pay a positive premium for “real” food. Furthermore, we found that student characteristics and attitudes significantly influence WTP. Specifically, gender, residency, college, and attitudes about price and origin of food are significant predictors of WTP.     

Institutional entrepreneurship and the negotiation and blending of multiple logics in the Southern Arizona local food system

In this paper, we explore the entrepreneurial leadership strategies and routine work of actors located across a diverse array of organizational settings (i.e., farmers’ markets, community farms, community-supported agriculture programs, food and seed banks, local food print media) that combine to shape and sustain the Southern Arizona (AZ) local food system (LFS). We use the theoretical principles of institutional entrepreneurship and logic multiplicity to show how the strategies and routine work of local food actors at the organizational level combine to negotiate system-level meaning and structure within and across the Southern AZ LFS, which is an otherwise seemingly fragmented and contentious social space. We illustrate how the entrepreneurial work performed within multiple organizations and organizational types converge to form a hybrid (or blended) local food logic. Implications are discussed and recommendations for practice are proposed.     

From “old school” to “farm-to-school”: Neoliberalization from the ground up

Farm-to-school (FTS) programs have garnered the attentions and energies of people in a diverse array of social locations in the food system and are serving as a sort of touchstone for many in the alternative agrifood movement. Yet, unlike other alternative agrifood initiatives, FTS programs intersect directly with the long-established institution of the welfare state, including its vestiges of New Deal farm programs and public entitlement. This paper explores how FTS is navigating the liminal terrain of public and private initiative, particularly the ways in which it interfaces with neoliberalism as both a material and discursive project. It examines the political emergence of school food programs and finds that FTS is strikingly similar to traditional school programs in objectives, but differs in approach. Yet, in their efforts to fill in the gaps created by political and economic neoliberalization, FTS advocates are in essence producing neoliberal forms and practices afresh. These include those associated with contingent labor relationships, private funding sources, and the devolution of responsibility to the local, all of which have serious consequences for social equity. The paper also discusses how FTS programs are employing the rhetoric of neoliberal governmentality, including personal responsibility and individual success, consumerism, and choice. While these may be tactical choices used to secure funding in a competitive environment, they may also contribute to the normalization of neoliberalism, further circumscribing the possibilities of what can be imagined and created to solve social problems.     

我国食品安全体系现状及建议

从食品安全战略、食品安全组织、食品安全法律法规、我国食品安全领域存在的问题和建议等方面综述我国食品安全体系。     

Farmers’ strategies as building block for rethinking sustainable intensification

Agricultural intensification, now commonly referred to as sustainable intensification, is presented in development discourse as a key means to simultaneously improve food security and reduce rural poverty without harming the environment. Taking a village in Laos as a case study, we show how government agencies and farmers could perceive the idea of agricultural intensification differently. The study illustrates how farmers with the opportunities for groundwater use typically choose to grow vegetables and high valued cash crops rather than intensify rice production. This contrasts with government and donor supported efforts to promote rice intensification as a means to increase food security and reduce rural poverty. The article’s main message is that farmers’ differing strategies are related to a variety of household characteristics and that farmers’ strategies should be central to the current discussion on sustainable intensification.     

Biodiversity conservation and the eradication of poverty

It is widely accepted that biodiversity loss and poverty are linked problems and that conservation and poverty reduction should be tackled together. However, success with integrated strategies is elusive. There is sharp debate about the social impacts of conservation programs and the success of community-based approaches to conservation. Clear conceptual frameworks are needed if policies in these two areas are to be combined. We review the links between poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation and present a conceptual typology of these relationships.