New England Feeding New England Newsletter
Cultivating a Reliable Food Supply
A project of the New England State Food System Planners Partnership
|
|
In 2019, the New England State Food System Planners Partnership launched the New England Feeding New England: Cultivating A Reliable Food Supply Project, a 10-year initiative to prepare the region for system shocks such as climate-related weather events and public health emergencies. Our aim is to increase regional food production for regional consumption. We can improve the reliability of our regional food system by strengthening supply chains and our goal is for 30% of food consumed in New England to be produced or harvested in New England by 2030.
|
|
The NEFNE research team is in their final stages of assembling data, conducting 11 focus group sessions, and double checking their assumptions and the methodologies created to inform their analysis of what it will take to reach our 30% regional food consumption by 2030 goal, from diet, production, and market channel perspectives in each state. We’ve also held two work sessions with our talented Advisory Committee. Researchers will be gathering for a full day in early June to discuss research findings. Writing of the final report will begin in June and we hope to have it completed and ready for release sometime in September.
|
|
Register for the next NEFNE Quarterly Update Meeting |
|
The next NEFNE Quarterly Update Meeting will be on June 21 at from 3 - 4:30pm. Emily Spiegel from the Center For Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School will share a draft version of the Food Systems Resilience Assessment Tool. This resource is designed for municipal and regional planners, community organizations, and other food system advocates to plan and prepare for food system disruptions within a broader resilience framework.
While various community food security and emergency food assessments and toolkits exist, we have identified a gap in the way food systems resilience more broadly - including issues of local and regional food production, supply, distribution, and equitable access - is incorporated in typical community and regional planning processes. This tool will provide planners and community leaders with the information and resources they need to integrate food system resilience into their planning and community development activities and ensure that their communities have a reliable, equitable food supply now and into the future. We look forward to hearing your questions and feedback about this draft tool on June 21.
|
|
Request for information about food planning projects |
|
A key part of the NEFNE project is the development of an inventory of current planning projects, policy conversations, and best practices tangent to food systems (e.g., land use planning, emergency preparedness, economic development, public health, emergency feeding, climate change) as well as responses to COVID-19-induced supply chain disruptions. Our goal is to connect with these projects to explore how they might integrate food planning into these processes in a coordinated way. If you know of any planning processes or projects in the 6 states or across the region that we should know about, please complete this very brief survey.
|
|
Changes are needed in the grocery store industry |
|
Consumers spend a majority of their food budget on food that they cook and eat at home, so to move the needle on public health and environmental sustainability, it is important to focus on grocery stores, including where they are located and what foods are available on their shelves. Based on NEFNE preliminary research, New England consumers spend $14 billion per year at retail grocery chains.
Over the past decades there has been growing consolidation of grocery store chains across the region and country, and this has accelerated over the past ten years. There is increasing awareness about how consolidation in any given industry reduces competition and raises prices for consumers. Food access and food security, as well as the health and economies of low income and racially diverse communities, are also negatively impacted by these anti-competitive practices.
If the region is going to achieve a goal of 30% regional food consumption from regionally produced, caught, and raised food, we need to substantially increase the amount of regionally sourced products that are available at grocery stores. However, because grocery stores are controlled by a handful of companies, it is hard for local producers to get their products onto the shelves of regional grocery chains and to command prices that ensure financial viability for producers. We will need to develop a number of new strategies to drive change in the grocery channel over the next five years.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
