By Emily Pasi
APA Communication and Outreach Associate
Article available here.
Communities are increasingly looking for ways to improve access to healthy, fresh food and support local producers. Through its role in Growing Food Connections, a national project aimed at building food security through innovative public policy, APA has been a part of the national movement to understand barriers to food systems policy change.
APA recently caught up with one of GFC’s Communities of Opportunity — Luna County, New Mexico — to learn more about the opportunities and challenges in building a food secure community. Charles “Tink” Jackson, the manager of Luna County, answered our questions.
What is the biggest food systems planning issue Luna County faces?
I believe our biggest issue is our proximity to the border and the number of undocumented immigrants we have living in our county. Every aspect of planning food systems is difficult at best when you do not start with an accurate target population. Your true needs are challenging to determine. You have to utilize other portions of your community like churches, shelters or schools to estimate those populations with some precision. That requires that every evaluation process be changeable and fluid if you want to measure real impacts of programs.
You have to get out with the people to know where the real needs are. We can’t solve problems here sitting at a table and the classic problem-solving model does not apply in the rural Southwest.
What do you want others to know about Luna County and your work?
Luna County is the tenth-poorest county in the nation, but we are rich in spirit and drive. We utilize what we have and our great community spirit to get to work and solve our own problems. When we hear reports stating that we are food insecure, we do not ask or expect anyone else to come in and fix our problems for us. We put our heads together, local entities form coalitions, and we get busy solving the problem.
What lessons do you want both rural and urban planners to learn from you?
I hope the biggest lesson we can teach is that hard work overcomes any economic or demographic obstacle. It is about expecting results and understanding that every approach has to be customized for that specific area.
What exciting things is Growing Food Connections assisting with?
The Growing Food Connections (GFC) project has helped us better understand how food systems work, how we can improve Luna County’s, and what really matters as we move forward. The knowledge and expertise in this group is amazing and very beneficial to all of us in theCommunities of Opportunity. GFC is always ready to help, to share and assist. Our local GFC Advisory Board received a significant amount of assistance from the national team to get started and that has been a huge part to our local successes to this point.
Where do you want food systems planning to be in 10-15 years?
We hope to be locally independent with local food on every table. One of the first things we learned in our GFC process was that locally grown produce is shipped over 800 miles away to only be shipped back from that location to our local grocery stores. This evolved because we did not have local markets or warehouse that could handle the volume that our local producers need to move to make a living. We are working on connecting those dots in a way that helps everyone in the system. We have local buy-in to this plan. Local people want local food and local producers want to ensure food needs are met.
What do you want people to learn through this interview?
It is so important to remember that nothing in this world can be solved by cookie-cutter approaches. What works on the east coast doesn’t necessarily apply to the west coast, and neither may apply to the desert southwest. Diversity is what makes America great. While we might all share similar problems and similar types of solutions may arise, each area of the country is unique. Rural areas have unique problems as well, and rural border areas have compounded problems on top of those. However, success in solving problems is not always related to median income or median education, success relates more to the desire of the people involved to be successful than it does anything else. When it comes to community planning, really knowing your community is every bit as important as the resources you have available to you.
Check out APA’s Planning and Community Health Center, Growing Food Connections, Food Systems Planning Interest Group (FIG), and Plan4Health project all month for the latest in food systems planning and policy best practices and resources.
Image: Deming, New Mexico, is the county seat of Luna County. Photo by Flickr user Jasperdo (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).