The immediate context for this financial landscape analysis is the learning crisis triggered by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic and the shrinking fiscal space available to governments. We look at the potential for school feeding programmes to play an expanded role in addressing the learning crisis – and at the public financing options available. The analysis draws on seven rapid assessment country studies commissioned by the SFI.
Regional vegetable production can only displace high-quality centralized production if consumers specifically desire regional produce. California leads the United States (US) in vegetable production and sets the industry standard for broccoli; however, there is increasing production in the Eastern US to shorten the broccoli supply chain for East Coast consumers.
The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act outlines a new, values-based approach for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to purchase commodities that supply child, senior, and community nutrition programs across the nation. The Act also directs USDA to target technical assistance and food safety investments for small and socially disadvantaged producers and businesses to ensure they have fair access to USDA contracts.
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”.
Discover how other cities improved their food system and learn from their experience
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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