Local Motivations, Regional Implications: Scaling from Local to Regional Food Systems in Northeastern North Carolina

Abstract

In communities across North America, organizations have launched local food system initiatives as a response to the depredations of the globalized agri-food economy; however, they increasingly find that they cannot achieve their desired impacts or sustain their ventures by operating solely within their home communities. Consequently, they embark on regional food system development initiatives. Drawing upon the experiences of 41 organizations-including Working Landscapes, a

Developing a community-based local food system in Will County, Illinois: insights from stakeholders' viewpoints

“…The first is grounded in the policy sciences (Maxwell & Slater, 2003;Pelletier et al, 1999) and emphasizes the need to give equal attention to the process as the product of any political change resulting from coalition-building between stakeholders. The second is rooted in community development studies (Bolles, 2019;Cumming et al, 2019;Kaufman, 2007;Mendes et al, 2011;Thilmany McFadden et al, 2016). It attempts to analyze food system stakeholders at a granular level and go beyond the binary vision of categorizing them as (a) those controlled by globalized industrial food systems or (b) those embodying the sustainable, alternative, and local food system.…”

“…Despite the increasing use of stakeholder assessments in studies on the transition towards localism in food systems (Bassarab et al, 2019;Benson et al, 2012;Cumming et al, 2019;Freedgood et al, 2011;Garcia-Gonzalez & Eakin, 2019;Gupta et al, 2018;Hammelman et al, 2020;Kaufman, 2007), there are few detailed studies on specific programs or policies developed at the county level (Low et al, 2015;Walsh et al, 2015). This paper aims to bridge this gap by examining the perspectives and viewpoints of stakeholders about establishing a local food system in Will County (Illinois), which is located in the vicinity of the third-largest city in the United States, Chicago, with agriculture and the food industry being the primary local economic development drivers in the area.…”

A Regional Imperative: The Case for Regional Food Systems

“…Nonetheless, practitioners moving into regional initiatives "are not achieving the results they want, nor is the food system yielding desired benefits" (Cumming et al, 2019, p. 208). Efforts to build regional food systems in northeastern North Carolina, for example, are well-intentioned but show limited efficacy; regional food system development is still poorly understood and inadequately supported (Cumming et al, 2019). Among the challenges cited-and we concur-are inadequate coordination, weak institutions, and the relative invisibility of food chain actors.…”

Sustainable food policies without sustainable farming? Challenges for agroecology-oriented farmers in relation to urban (sustainable) food policies

“…Conventional producer organizations can act as intermediary networks to enhance on-farm transitions to sustainability (Groot-Kormelinck et al 2022) or at territorialized scales (Deaconu et al 2021). Some authors see a shift from local to regional scales as necessary to transcend 'direct to-consumer' sales, in order to meet increasing demand for local and sustainable foods (Cumming et al 2019). This would not necessarily mean losing the values inherent to local food systems, but rather reconfiguring and adapting them to the different farmers' profiles and farming contexts, and adopting a dynamic approach to address the power imbalances and exclusions that occur when the AFNs are created (Mount 2012).…”