L.A. City Departments and LAUSD set an example that has since influenced many other areas in the United States. The notable success of the Good Food Purchasing Program in 2012 led to a substantial number of requests for technical assistance from other cities and food policy councils looking to implement similar strategies. Indeed the Program has set off a nationwide movement to adopt the Program standards in localities small and large. This led to the development of the Center for Good Food Purchasing in 2015, a NGO which now owns and manages the programme, as well as its expansion across the United States. By now 27 public institutions in 14 U.S. cities are enrolled, which collectively spend nearly USD 895 million on food each year.
The Program is adaptable to specific contexts and such adaptations have been used to further advance agroecology, e.g. in Cook County. According to the Center’s staff, the Good Food Purchasing Program could be applied anywhere, including in low-income countries.
As of 2018, several other cities (San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; Chicago, IL; Cook County, IL) have adopted the Good Food Purchasing Program and campaigns are underway in many additional cities (Austin, TX; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Madison, WI; Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; New York; Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore) to push for its adoption.
The Good Food Purchasing Program has encouraged elected and governmental officials to re-examine how they can use public budgets to better serve their community. That fundamental shift in thinking will produce important positive results for years to come.
TEEBAgriFood’s Evaluation Framework and methodologies
Sustainable Food Systems
TEEB
TEEBAgriFood’s Evaluation Framework answers the question: What should we evaluate about food systems? And TEEBAgriFood’s methodologies answer the question: How should we do these evaluations? TEEBAgriFood illustrates five families of applications to compare: (a) different policy scenarios; (b) different farming typologies; (c) different food and beverage products; (d) different diets/ food plates; and (e) adjusted versus conventional national or sectoral accounts.
TEEBAgriFood gives ten examples showing how to apply this framework and methodologies for various types of evaluations. One of them is, for example, a study in New Zealand of 15 conventional and 14 organic fields that valued 12 ecosystem services and found both crops as well as other ecosystem services to be higher in the organic fields.
The TEEBAgriFood evaluation framework provides a structure and an overview of what should be included in the analysis. However, methods of valuation depend on the values to be assessed, availability of data, and the purpose of the analysis. Ideally one should be able to say with some confidence what are the externalities associated with each euro or dollar spent on a given kind of food, produced, distributed and disposed of in a given way. The application of the framework requires an interdisciplinary approach, where all relevant stakeholders, including policy-makers, businesses, and citizens, understand and identify questions that are to be answered by a valuation exercise. Therefore, stakeholder engagement across sectors is critical to the effective application of TEEBAgriFood in specific contexts and policy arenas.
Rooted in the Danish political ambition to design policies that enable the private and public sector to become more innovative and competitive, the Minister of Agriculture put in place clear procedures for involving relevant stakeholders in order to ensure that the plan could meet the needs of the sector. Involvement was secured at the beginning of the plan development process based on a year-long consultation process and collaboration with the organic sector.
Preparation was based on a comprehensive process involving more than 200 stakeholders, who participated in three large workshops.
The Organic Food Council, a government-led forum of relevant interest groups, was involved in prioritizing the initiatives recommended, as a result of three workshops and 35 interviews held with key actors in the organic sector.
Stakeholder involvement was key to the Danish Organic Action Plan and ultimately led to its great success.
