Policies Supporting Local Food in the United States

Steve Martinez

Agriculture, 2016, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-13

Abstract: Local food has been the subject of federal, state, and local government policies in recent years throughout the United States as consumer demand has grown. Local foods have been linked to several government priorities—including enhancing the rural economy, the environment, and supporting agricultural producers. This article provides an overview of U.S. Federal, State and regional policies designed to support local food systems. It details the latest economic information on policy, relying on findings from several national surveys and a synthesis of recent literature. Federal policies related to local food systems were greatly expanded by the 2008 Farm Bill, and are further expanded in the Agricultural Act of 2014. United States policies address several barriers to the further expansion of local food markets, including scaling up output of small farms to address the needs of larger commercial outlets, lack of infrastructure for increasing local food sales, ability to trace product source, and producer education regarding local food expansion.

Keywords: Farm Bill; farm to school; Farmers’ Market Promotion Program; state food policy councils; farmers markets; food hubs; intermediated marketing channels; direct-to-consumer outlets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/6/3/43/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/6/3/43/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:6:y:2016:i:3:p:43-:d:77066

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().