March 2024 - Page 2 of 5 - City Food Policy

Public food procurement as a game changer for food system transformation

The last decade has seen various countries, regions, and cities from low-income to high-income economies develop public food procurement (PFP) initiatives designed to use government purchasing power and regular demand for food as a policy instrument to promote sustainable development.1 These initiatives—often also referred to as institutional food procurement, including school meals programmes and purchase of food for public hospitals, prisons, universities, public building cafeterias, and other social programmes— have been increasingly recognised as an important entry point to trigger more sustainable food systems and healthy diets. They are also an important instrument for the achievement of target 12.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): “to promote public procurement practices that are sustainable in accordance with national policies and priorities”.

Food Action Cities: Case Study Archive

Discover how other cities improved their food system and learn from their experience

Marketing NY grains and legumes to the NYC market

During the pandemic, GrowNYC’s retail market saw demand for locally grown grains and legumes more than triple. With the upcoming expansion of its wholesale market, the organization is well positioned to help NY growers access wholesale buyers. It’s a significant marketplace with NYC schools purchasing $1 million annually on beans alone. That’s why the New York Farm Viability Institute board of directors was pleased to fund a proposal that will help connect legume and small grain growers to the New York City marketplace in its recent competitive grant round.

The Movement to Revive Local Grains — and the Infrastructure Required to Keep It Going

Walk into an artisan bakery in New York or Seattle, Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, and more likely than not, you’ll discover your baguette or boule was made from locally sourced flour.

A bakery using local flour was a rarity even a decade ago. But the current expansive landscape for these products is not an accident. It’s the result of years’ worth of dedication on the part of regional food systems advocates to revive wheats both ancient (emmer, einkorn, spelt) and heritage (red fife, white Sonora, warthog and some of more than 30,000 others), along with varieties of rye, barley, buckwheat and oats.

Farm program pushes small grains as next big thing

The Hudson Valley was once the breadbasket of the U.S. But poor farming practices, the building of the Erie Canal and cheaper long-range transportation brought grains to the Midwest, where they became a crop mainstay. Over time, food growing and processing operations consolidated into what has become a more industrialized food system.

Building sustainable and resilient food systems: Integrating Market Systems at the Centre of Urban-Rural Linkages

On the 21st of April, Earth Day 2022, a technical consultation was hosted by UN-Habitat. The subject was integrating market systems at the centre of urban-rural linkages as a pathway to building sustainable and resilient food systems. A concept note for the
consultation can be found here. The topic of market systems builds on the worldwide crisis of food markets during the pandemic and the widespread innovations and lessons from food market responses
to crisis.
The crisis of food systems and the need for their transformation became a global conversation in the first United Nations Food Systems Summit in 2021. To bring market actors from the front lines of impact and response to the shocks of COVID-19 and other
crises, three global market platforms were invited to be co-organizers of the consultation. They are the World Union of Wholesale Markets (WUWM), the Market Cities Initiative, and the World Farmers Markets Coalition (WFMC).

From Plate to Planet: How local governments are driving action on climate change through food

The small window of opportunity the world has to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global
warming to 1.5°C is rapidly closing. The latest
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report, published in March 2023, sounded a stark
warning and final call to action. The report
underlined that global warming is already killing
people, destroying nature, and making the world
poorer. Damages are accelerating as temperatures
rise, causing unprecedented costs to people,
economies, the environment, and food security.
Women, youth, marginalized urban populations,
smallholder farmers, and Indigenous communities
bear the brunt of these damages. Deeper and faster 1
cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are the only
way to limit these impacts.

Centering Values in Food Procurement

In September, SFC changed the name of our newest program from the “Supply Chain” Program to the “Value Chain” Program. Read on to learn why we made that change and how the program is transforming our food system.

Strengthening food markets across the rural-urban continuum

The importance of maintaining functioning food markets in the face of global food supply chain vulnerability and disruption has brought new attention to markets that support local and territorial food systems. Drawing on lessons from Covid-19 impacts on rural and urban regions and their populations, our author presents proposals for these markets – formal and informal alike – to cope with future shocks.
The world has been living through the Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) since early 2020 with differing impacts and responses between rural and urban areas. The pandemic began in cities and spread to rural areas over the course of 2020, and continues to evolve as new variants keep spreading. Local and national governments, the private sector, civil society, donors and the UN system pivoted in 2020 to analyse impacts of Covid-19 and, based on new evidence, apply interventions to address the most Covid-vulnerable. The capacity to understand and respond to protect populations in poorer countries has been uneven and far more challenging in rural areas, especially in the Global South.

Public food procurement for sustainable food systems and healthy diets

Sustainable Public Food Procurement (PFP) represents a key game changer for food systems transformation. It can influence both food consumption and food production patterns. It can deliver multiple social, economic, and environmental benefits towards sustainable food systems for healthy diets.

This publication aims to contribute to the improved understanding, dissemination, and use of PFP as a development tool in particular in the case of school meals programmes. In this Volume 2, researchers, policymakers, and development partners can find extensive evidence of the instruments, enablers, and barriers for PFP implementation. It also provides case studies with local, regional, and national experiences from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America.

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