Best Practices & Challenges for Farmers Market Incentive Programs: A Guide for Policymakers & Practitioners

Abstract

Food, nutrition, and agricultural policy have risen to the forefront of local, regional, and national discourse in recent years. Such discourse has been prompted by the rapid growth of the "food movement," a diverse social movement encompassing a variety of perspectives on the way that food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed in society (Pollan). Actors within the movement adopt differing views on the relationship between the food system and public health, the economy, the environment, and social equity, for example, as well as on ways in which the system can be reformed to better meet society's evolving needs. Contemporary food policy initiatives must rise to the challenges posed by an increasingly diverse group of food system stakeholders and, where possible, integrate divergent perspectives to form more comprehensively beneficial policy solutions. This paper explores Farmers Market Incentive Programs (FMIPs) as one policy and programmatic innovation that lies at the nexus of two powerful