LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS AND PUBLIC POLICY: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS AND PUBLIC POLICY: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 

Executive Summary

This paper reviews the state of knowledge about local food systems (LFS). We identify LFS as an effective mean to achieve food sovereignty, defined as the right of people to local food production, healthy and ecological, realized in equitable conditions that respect the right of every partner to decent working conditions and incomes.

To achieve this vision of food sovereignty, LFS have to go beyond the distance travelled by food products before they reach the final consumers (food miles) and integrate social, economic and environmental benefits. The main types of LFS which meet these criteria are farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture (CSA), box schemes, institutional local procurement initiatives, and farm shops. While most of the literature on LFS focuses on the expected economic, environmental and social impacts of these alternatives, relatively few examined the actual impacts. Nevertheless, the existing evidence highlight the positive effects of such initiatives: better incomes for producers, lower carbon footprint (depending on method of production), and promotion of healthier diets (through better access to fresh fruits and vegetables as well as nutrition education associated with these initiatives).

Farmers’ markets, CSA and other initiatives are becoming increasingly present in industrial countries in recent years, but they still only represent a very small part of the food market. Our review of the literature examined which public policies have been identified as effective means to support the emergence, consolidation and further development of LFS. We have come up with a large inventory of such policies proposed in the literature, although few have been tested systematically. We found that the problems related to financing, to the market power of large firms in food values chains, and to the lack of knowledge—both from the producers and consumers side—were often raised as obstacles to the scaling-up of LFS.

We have also reviewed the agricultural policies adopted by federal and provincial authorities in Canada to assess whether they are supportive of LFS. We found that even though there is no national policy to promote LFS, provincial governments have been active with various programs in this area. There is much variations from one provinces to another, but the existing programs tend to cluster on the demand side, focusing on consumer education and marketing projects, even running some themselves (the origin labelling and promotion programs). To a lesser extent, we saw some program to support organic farming (transition programs) but very few focusing on processing and distribution.

Given the gap which exists in understanding the impact of existing public policy initiatives, our next step will be to conduct field work in the provinces of Québec and Ontario. Our analysis will move us towards the overall objective in our research program, which is to provide knowledge for policy action on food sovereignty.