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Opportunity for students | Global Innovation Challenge 2018

The University at Buffalo is hosting a week-long student workshop focused on promoting food equity among smallholder, or small-scale, farms in the Global South. Students from any university, any discipline, and any stage of their academic career are welcome to attend. The workshop will be held in Buffalo, New York from May 21 to May 25, 2018. Read about the opportunity at: http://www.buffalo.edu/globalhealthequity/news-events/upcoming-events/annual-global-innovation-challenge.html 

New Special Issue of Built Environment Journal Tackles Food Equity

Release of Special Issue of Built Environment: Planning for Equitable Urban and Regional Food Systems

(The text for this post includes information from both UB News Center and Alexandrine Press Blogged Environment.)

How does and can planning and design enhance the freedom and well being of marginalized actors in the food system – low-income residents, people of color, small-holder farmers, and refugees – the very people the alternative food movements purport to serve?

In this Special Issue of the journal Built Environment on “Planning for Equitable Urban and Regional Food Systems,” researchers from across the Global North and the Global South explore how planning and design disciplines can use food systems as a lever for broader economic and social transformation in marginalized communities. The eleven articles cover a range of topics, including: the importance of addressing inclusion in planning and design processes, the potential benefits of urban agriculture, and how rapid urbanization is creating unintended consequences in the food retail and food waste management sectors. Guest Editors Samina Raja, Kevin Morgan, and Enjoli Hall frame the issue with an editorial article that outlines three major oversights in planning practice that contribute to inequities and injustices in the food system:

  • Efforts to strengthen food systems rarely confront the historical factors that have contributed to a community’s food system failures;
  • Mainstream planning and design processes often overlook the voice of the marginalized people such planning efforts are intended to help; and
  • Food systems aren’t viewed as being a lever for broader social and economic change and equity.

Collectively, the papers in the issue raise questions about the nature of planners and designers’ engagement in city and regional food systems, and the ways in which such engagement impacts inclusion, equity, and justice. The authors raise clear, promising, practical ideas for the future of both food systems planning scholarship and practice that draw on unique perspectives and ideas of a broad range of food system stakeholders in diverse settings around the globe.

Access the Special Issue here.

The Special Issue is open access and available free of charge through the support of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. 

Launch of Global Food Policy Database

Press release

UB and RUAF Announce International Launch of Global Database for City and Regional Food Policies

Release date: October 16, 2017

The University at Buffalo’s Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab and Community for Global Health Equity in partnership with RUAF (Global partnership for sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food systems) are pleased to announce the launch of the Global Database for City and Regional Food Policies. This database is the first publically available repository (database) of international sub-national food system policies in the world.

Over the past nine months, the partners have worked to develop a searchable database of city and regional policies developed and enacted by cities around the world. The project was conceived two years ago in response to the demand from many cities for support to their own food policy design processes. The database is a public internet resource maintained on the UB Food Lab website, which can be accessed online here:

Urban and regional food system sustainability and resilience are a growing international concern. Due to challenges related to rapid urban growth; growing food and nutrition insecurity; unbalanced food availability, distribution and access; environmental degradation, resource scarcity and climate change; and unsustainable production and consumption patterns, including generation of food waste, sub-national governments around the world are grappling with how to build a sustainable, equitable food system for their residents. City and Regional food systems enable the growing, processing, distribution, and acquisition of food, and management, reduction, and recovery of excess food and food-related waste in urban and sub-national territories. The United Nation’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda recognize that sustainable development cannot be achieved without building more resilient cities. International declarations like the

The Global Database for City and Regional Food Policies fills an existing gap in information. Governing bodies at sub-national levels – town, village, city, municipal, regional, provincial, state – are becoming more aware of the need to support, encourage and regulate urban and peri-urban agriculture activities as well as other related food systems and land use issues. Many sub-national governments across the globe express a clear demand for information and knowledge and concrete policy examples to help them develop and enact food-related plans and policies. Without a single, searchable resource of existing policies, sub-national governments struggle to find an accessible retrieval location for examples of policies that strengthen food systems, and which are appropriate for their level of capacity and influence.
Drawing on prior work completed on the Growing Food Connections database of policies from the United States and Canada, the team developed the searchable Global Database for City and Regional Food Policies that provides copies of legislation, plans, funding allocations, or other public policy actions adopted by sub-national governments around the world. The goal of the database is to emphasize cross-national learning both between Global North and Global South, and among countries in the Global North and South. The database stores PDFs of actual adopted and/or enacted policies, regulations, plans and ordinances on a range of food systems topics ranging from food production, processing, consumption, and food waste management. Researchers from the UB Food Lab and RUAF have populated the database with an initial set of policies provided by RUAF. Each policy is coded with a series of categorical search terms that allow users to prioritize the type of policy they wish to find through the Advanced Search feature. The database includes categories such as country, language, policy type, food system sector, level of government, population size, and spatial distinction (urban, rural, peri-urban). In addition, the research team assigned a set of keywords to each policy, so that users may search via the Basic Search tool, which features an auto-fill component of the keywords for users with interest in general topic areas.

Fore greater usability of the database for a global audience, policies are included in the language of the associated jurisdiction. Users can access the link to the database on various international forum websites, including www.ruaf.org, www.iclei.org/cityfood, and others.

The policy database will be updated with additional policies regularly. The UB Food Lab and RUAF will engage local policy-makers and planners to provide insight and local knowledge on the policies, enhance the coding process, and help disseminate the resource.

The team welcomes any local governments or support organizations from around the world to submit adopted, sub-national policies for coding and inclusion on the database at any time. Policy submissions (in PDF form) can be sent to the Food Lab team at

Sub-national food systems policies from the United States and Canada are available on the Growing Food Connections website at

The development and creation of the database was made possible by support from the University at Buffalo (UB), Community for Global Health Equity (CGHE), Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab, and RUAF (Global partnership for sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food systems). Special thanks goes to Marielle Dubbeling, Executive Director of RUAF; Dr. Samina Raja, Principal Investigator of the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab and Co-lead of CGHE at UB; Doug McCullum, Web Manager for the UB School of Architecture and Planning; Daniela Leon, and Grace O’Connor, Joe Quinn, Erin Sweeney and Danielle Vazquez, Research Interns and Assistants at the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab.

Bipartisan Legislation to Connect Farmers to Local Consumer Markets

Information for this news post was taken from this article.

Three representatives have introduced HR 3941, the Local Food And Regional Market Supply Act (Local FARMS Act). Representatives Pingree (D-ME), Fortenberry (R-NE), and Maloney (D-NY) have introduced legislation to assist farmers better access growing markets as well as help consumers access healthy local food. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has brought forth a companion bill in the Senate. The legislation would:

  • help farmers implement food safety practices and equipment upgrades;
  • create a new food-as-medicine pilot program to support fruit and vegetable prescriptions for low-income individuals;
  • expand the Seniors Farmers Market Nutrition Program to include veterans;
  • provide schools more resources to purchase food locally;
  • ensure USDA grants and loans can be used to support local livestock, dairy, and poultry processing infrastructure; and
  • help domestic organic farmers meet the growing demand for organic food by continuing the organic cost-share program.

More details of the bill are available here.

This bill helps to reconnect local farms to local markets, both rural and urban, and supports revitalization of local economies.

National organizations supporting the bill include the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, National Farmers Union, American Farmland Trust, National Young Farmers Coalition, Food Corps, Wholesome Wave, Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy at Columbia University, Self-Help Credit Union and Affiliates.

Samina Raja to Keynote It Takes a Region Conference 2017

Reposted from nesawg.org

NESAWG’s annual It Takes a Region Conference brings together farm and food systems practitioners across the 12-state Northeast region to learn, debate, collaborate, and innovate solutions to critical food systems issues. Each year, the conference looks at the trajectory of the food and farm movement and the role this network can play in shaping its future. The conference offers in-depth working sessions that tackle important questions about the regional food system and how to strengthen it, drawing from the collective expertise and wisdom of conference attendees.

This year, the conference is in Baltimore, MD from November 9-11, with Dr. Samina Raja giving the keynote address. Dr. Samina Raja is a global leader in food systems planning. Her research and leadership has empowered not only communities of color in her hometown of Buffalo, NY, but throughout the U.S. and global south. She is the founder of the Food Lab at University of Buffalo, supporting food systems researchers in service of vulnerable communities and Growing Food Connections, a national network of food system planners. She is a native of Kashmir, India and is a Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Buffalo.

Food systems planning may be a nascent field, but it’s of crucial importance for scaling sustainable agriculture and improving food access and economic opportunity in communities of color. While there are many academic, nonprofit, and government organizations devoted to studying the food system, very few partner with low-income and communities of color to create lasting change. Samina Raja’s innovative work provides a welcome blueprint for researchers who seek such partnerships, however unlikely they may appear at first glance.

In her keynote, Dr. Raja will weave the themes of her work with this year’s conference theme, Humanizing the Food System. To learn more and register for the conference, visit the conference webpages.

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Samina Raja To Give Talk as Part of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Planning Lecture Series

Georgia Tech Center for Urban Innovation is hosting a series of Planning lectures throughout the Fall of 2017. On November 3, 2017 from 2pm to 3pm Dr. Samina Raja will be giving a talk titled “Planning As If People Eat: Creating Equitable and Healthy Communities.”

View the talk here.

Georgia Tech Center for Urban Innovation Planning Series: Fall 2017

Vanu Thakuriah – Urban Informatics: Examples, Prospects and Challenges

October 20, 2017, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm at Georgia Tech College of Business, Room 222

Samina Raja – Food Systems and Health

November 3, 2017, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm at TBA

Ed Feser – The U.S. University: Opportunities and Challenges

December 1, 2017, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm at Georgia Tech College of Business, Room 222

Vanessa Watson – Planning In and For Cities of the Global South

December 8, 2017, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm at Georgia Tech Architecture Easy, Room 123

How Immigrant-Run Ethnic Food Retailers Improve Food Environments

How do immigrant business-owners contribute to the food landscape in cities? An article by University at Pennsylvania doctoral student Maryam Khojasteh tackles this important question. Immigrant-run ethnic food retail stores, which are often located in urban neighborhoods, are reported to provide healthy foods. Yet, there is little research on how these stores manage to operate successfully in low-resource environments. Based on a qualitative pilot case study of Buffalo, New York, the article describes the challenges immigrant entrepreneurs overcome to contribute to a healthy food environment. Factors for success include store owners’ membership in ethnic networks, prior business experience, and understanding of niche market opportunities. This article concludes with policy suggestions for local governments. 

Read the article here.

$3 Million USDA NIFA Grant to Study New Locations for Crop Production

University of Florida researchers have received a $3 million grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture – a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture – to lead a 4-year research project looking at more places to grow produce. Scientists refer to changes in our climate, loss of fresh water and competition for resources as major threats in farmers’ ability to increase production of fruits and vegetables. Researchers will also be looking into future production costs of commonly used crops in the United States.

Read more here.

Proposals Sought For Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference

Black Urban Growers (BUGs) is accepting presentation/workshop proposals for the 2017 Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, November 10-12, 2017. “Rooted and Rising: Black Southern Land Legacies of Resistance & Resilience” is the conference theme, and proposals should consider resiliency, the many strategies we can and have used to persevere, and even thrive in the face of adversity. Discuss/share survival tactics, options, and opportunities for solutions and success. At least one facilitator in your workshop must be a person of African descent. All proposals must be completed online or postmarked by August 1, 2017.

Part of BUGs mission is to cultivate Black leadership in the movement for food justice and food sovereignty, it is required that at least one facilitator in proposed workshops be a person of African descent.

Proposal Formats:

  • Workshop (Interactive/Hands-on/Demonstration Style Workshops welcome and preferred)
  • Panel Discussion
  • Roundtable
  • Community Work Project
  • Skill Building Project
  • Other

Length:  

  • 75 minutes total (includes time allotted for Q&A)

Submission Options:

  1. Complete application using the online form.
  2. Download and email completed application to workshops@blackfarmersconf.org
  3. Download and fax completed application to 212-465-9274
  4. Mailto:

Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference
c/o WhyHunger
505 8th Ave, Ste. 2100
New York, NY  10018

 

See the full application here.

Stakeholder Survey on Midwest Agriculture

The University of Minnesota and Future iQ are collaborating to explore the future of Midwest agriculture. This survey is open to all stakeholders and people who have an interest in the future of Midwest Agriculture, which covers the major agricultural areas of the central parts of USA and Canada. We want to hear your insights and perspectives about the future of this region, and its communities, landscape and industries.

Future of Midwest Agriculture Home