Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Legislating Local Food

- Andrea Hermanson

A recent proposal was passed this spring by the City of Seattle to support the infrastructure for promoting and funding local, community-based food and farming networks. The Local Food Action Initiative will support local and regional food systems and is strategically intertwined with the City’s goals of “race and social justice, environmental sustainability, economic development, and emergency preparedness.” The initiative is ground-breaking, in that it ties food to justice and acknowledges issues of hunger, health disparities, problems of industrial agriculture, and pollution which plague our communities via the current global capitalist system. While it certainly does not point a direct finger at capitalism, it is a step.

The website outlines the following agenda items:

  • Increase support of local and regional agriculture and community gardens and make stronger connections between our rural and urban areas
  • Improve public health through providing increased access to healthy, culturally appropriate, and locally and regionally grown foods, especially for low-income households
  • Reduce climate impacts of our food system
  • Improve the security of our local food supply in the event that a major disaster were to occur
  • Reduce negative environmental effects relating to the food system including minimizing energy use and reducing food waste
  • Create local economic opportunities related to local food production, processing, distribution, and waste management
  • Support strategies to connect major institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and jails, to locally grown food.
  • Build community through developing community gardens, promoting farmers’ markets, involving immigrants, and developing programs that contribute to sustainability.

The City’s website gives some examples of what this might look like:

  • Developing a City of Seattle Food Policy Action Plan which would identify policies, programs and opportunities to promote local food system sustainability and security.
  • Strengthening existing local farmer's markets by finding permanent locations.
  • Identifying additional locations and infrastructure for community gardens and farmer's markets to strengthen our community garden program and maximize accessibility to all neighborhoods and communities.
  • Supporting programs such as a Food Bank–Food Waste Recycling Project and an Urban Farmland Initiative that can assist in providing fresh food for food banks and meal programs.
  • Forming a Regional Food Policy Council that can assist the City and the County with developing policies that contribute to our goals.

During a recent event hosted by Community Alliance for Global Justice last weekend, I also learned that this initiative will do things such as: (1) support the establishment of a new “Marra Farm” in North Seattle, which is an increasingly diverse neighborhood and has a growing immigrant population; (2) vastly expand community-based gardening through more P-Patch land in all neighborhoods; and (3) give schools for the first time permission (and some funding, I believe) to purchase locally-grown food instead of the mass-produced, cheapest food available. The Local Food Action Initiative could have powerful, positive impacts on our communities—but we have to make sure that in the face of economic crises, these forward-thinking, new programs are not cut!

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