Posts Tagged: hunger
Good food for all: L.A. tackles food policies
With a population of more than 10 million residents, Los Angeles County faces enormous challenges related to poverty and hunger. Over a million L.A. County residents face hunger or food insecurity every day, according to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. A Sept. 6 Los Angeles Times article detailed the problems faced by local food pantries, as they struggle to cope with a demand for food that’s risen by 48 percent in just two years. At the same time, with cheap fast food, and limited access to affordable healthy food, childhood obesity is an increasingly critical problem. Forty percent of middle-school age children in Los Angeles County are now classified as overweight or obese.
Local elected officials are embarking on an effort to more systematically address these issues. Last fall, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa convened a group of experts, bringing together community organizers, restauranteurs, public health experts, employers, farmers, urban gardeners and others to form the Los Angeles Food Policy Task Force. This was a short-term effort to gather information and make recommendations to the mayor and decision makers. The task force recently released a report, “The Good Food for All Agenda: Creating a New Regional Food System for Los Angeles,” outlining an ambitious plan for improving access to healthy food in Los Angeles.
The task force defined “good food” as food that is healthy, affordable, fair (meaning that all participants in the food supply chain receive fair compensation) and produced sustainably, using principles of environmental stewardship.
Some of the task force's recommendations were:
- Develop a regional food hub, which can coordinate supply and demand for local, sustainable food. (Farms in several counties were included in the definition of “local” for the Los Angeles area).
- Encourage school districts to procure sustainable, local food and provide children with higher quality lunches.
- Promote and improve participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program.
- Facilitate neighborhood food production by streamlining permits for community gardens, and expanding joint use agreements where schools offer their land for community gardens.
- Start an ongoing regional food policy council, which will include both city and county decision makers and community leaders.
While Los Angeles is just one of a number of major metropolitan areas to form a task force of this nature, it’s exciting to see the state (and nation’s) most populous county addressing food policy issues. Although Los Angeles County has a relatively small number of farms, neighboring counties, including Ventura, still have significant commercial agriculture. Policies like those recommended by the L.A. Task Force not only improve choices and healthy options for consumers, they can also lead to new markets for local farmers.
UC ANR programs, such as UC Cooperative Extension in Los Angeles County, offer research-based expertise in urban gardening, nutrition education, sustainable food production and more, and serve as a resource for local policymakers and residents working to improve food access. To learn more about the L.A. Food Policy Task Force and read the Good Food for All Agenda, see http://goodfoodla.org/.
Improving access to local produce is part of the "Good Food For All" Agenda.
Clinton lauds UC research in hunger speech
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged the contribution of UC research in combating world hunger in a speech yesterday honoring the winners of the 2010 World Food Prize.
The president of Bread for the World, David Beckmann, and president of Heifer International, Jo Luck, were honored by the State Department for expanding their grassroots organizations and bringing help to the world's hungry.
Bread for the World is a Christian advocacy organization that presses lawmakers to support anti-hunger policies. Heifer International brings food and income producing animals to extremely poor families around the globe.
In her presentation, titled "Remove the Barriers, Remove the Fear of Sharing," Clinton recounted a litany of work by U.S. scientists to feed the world.
"In South and Southeast Asia, we’re seeing good research being done on rice, and with our support, research at UC-Davis and the International Rice Research Institute are developing strains of rice that thrive even when they have been submerged in water," Clinton said, according to the speech text published on the State Department website.
Clinton noted that the federal government supports agricultural research and extension with funding to benefit farmers and consumers worldwide.
"Some of this is not expensive, like no-till farming, which has been adopted by thousands of farmers in Asia with help from the United States. And there is so much that we can do in conveying information about what works as well as investing in new answers," Clinton said.
Hillary Clinton