March 2024
The City Food Policy team will provide quarterly updates regarding developments with the project. Moreover, as the project exists within the global landscape of values-based procurement and food system work, in addition to regularly updating the What We’re Reading page, each quarter we will also highlight national and international efforts.
Project Update
Practitioner and stakeholder input is vital to any effort to develop the practical tools that can guide food policy and other food supply chain actions. Integrating stakeholders into the process of designing, validating, interpreting, and disseminating research is part of what sets this project apart from other research studies. Accordingly, the City Food Policy Team recently met with 13 dry bean farmers on February 26th, 2024, at the Cornell Agritech building in Geneva, NY. Together we mapped out the dry bean supply chain in NY (see a draft of the map below), validating financial, production, and marketing data that the research team pulled from the restricted-access Ag Census specifically for dry-bean growers in New York, and discussing the bottlenecks and opportunities for increased production and profitability.
Key Takeaways
Market confidence and consistency is a greater motivator for farmer behavior than might be a 10% increase in unstable contracts (i.e. forward contracting).
Supply exists within NY to meet all of NYC demands for dry-beans, though some additional information may be needed regarding if NYC could shift some of its canned bean purchases to dry beans.
Looking Beyond New York
This recent paper “describes the participatory modeling experiences of five discrete teams across the U.S. working to develop models of food systems to identify leverage points and policies to induce food system transformation”. Our team finds this useful to see examples of other research projects that have integrated stakeholders into modeling processes. Learn more: Navigating Community Engagement in Participatory Modeling of Food Systems
What’s Happening Around the Globe
In 2023 the FAO released the following report on the Hidden Costs of Agrifood Systems, highlighting the benefits of applying a true cost accounting approach in guiding food chain actors’ and policy makers’ decision-making if the ultimate goal is sustainable development.
Check back next month to learn What’s New with the project!