Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Zingerman's is a model for small food businesses. (Zingerman's), Washington Post
A new report says local food businesses are key to economic growth and recovery.
Just published by nonprofits the Wallace Center and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the report looks at 24 “community food enterprises” around the world and concludes:
“To many, local food is exclusively about proximity, with discriminating consumers demanding higher quality food grown, caught, processed, cooked, and sold by people they know and trust. But an equally important part of local food is local ownership of food businesses.”
The report says local food businesses are well suited to take “advantage of the growing diseconomies of global food businesses. Long, nonlocal supply chains, for example, are increasingly vulnerable to rising oil prices.” That makes community food enterprises competitive, the study says, and a magnet for local economic growth.
A recent article on the subject in the Washington Post states “More than a dozen studies have shown that every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two to four times the income, wealth and jobs than at an equivalent nonlocal business.”
Michael Shuman, an author for the Wallace Center study, says all locally owned business keep money in the community, but food businesses play a special role. Shuman says in an interview at Civil Eats:
“Food turns out to be an important entry in consumers’ consciousness about the benefits of buying local. We understand the virtues of local food viscerally, emotionally and literally. We can taste the quality, meet the producer and visit the farm and indeed interact personally with every aspect of a local food supply chain, should we choose to do so. That is not necessarily true of local energy, local finance or local manufacturing. Plus, because food businesses dominate much of landscape of both rural America as well as most developing countries, the food sector serves as the critical foundation for rethinking economic development.”
According to the Washinton Post article “skeptics argue it would be just as effective, if not more so, to persuade a huge corporation such as Walmart to purchase foods locally. “But that’s absolutely untrue,” said Shuman. “You get a fraction of the benefits that people are seeing with local food, and we’re looking at models that are more competitive than Walmart.”
Walmart, now the nation’s largest supermarket chain, says its committed to buying more of its produce from local growers. But Tom Laskawy at Grist echoes Shuman’s arguement saying that although “Walmart will no doubt find ways to benefit from the spiking interest in local food” it still bleeds money out of local economies. “It’s the Community Food Enterprise’s case studies” Laskawy says ”that provide the real roadmap to a robust food system.”
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Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture. |
