Blueprint for a National Food Strategy

Eating is a fundamental human need, and the food and agriculture system is vital to the American economy. Yet, our food system often works at cross-purposes, providing abundance while creating inefficiencies, and imposing unnecessary burdens on our economy, environment, and overall health. Many federal policies, laws, and regulations guide and structure our food system. However, these laws are fragmented and sometimes inconsistent, hindering food system improvements. To promote a healthy, economically viable, equitable, and resilient food system, the United States needs a coordinated federal approach to food and agricultural law and policy – that is, a national food strategy.

A national food strategy has the potential to offer a comprehensive, coordinated path forward to improve the food system. Specifically, it could help leaders and members of the public understand how various aspects of food and agriculture connect and are interdependent. The process of developing a strategy could clarify where agencies and legislators currently undertake overlapping or conflicting activities. In addition, the process could provide opportunities for soliciting and incorporating public and stakeholder input. Ultimately, a national food strategy could harmonize law and policymaking around food and agriculture, providing a mechanism for legislators and agencies to establish, prioritize, and pursue common goals.

This report provides a roadmap for the process to develop a national food strategy. Consequently, it focuses primarily on process rather than policy, because an effective process is a critical foundation to any coordinated strategy. In developing this blueprint, this report examines several models, which collectively may chart a path for such a strategy. First, several nations have developed national food strategies that may inform American efforts. These countries generally have food system challenges similar to those in the United States – e.g., maintaining or improving the success and resilience of the food and agricultural sectors, ensuring access to healthy food, promoting sustainable food production, and harmonizing the work of numerous agencies. Their strategies also illustrate a range of methods that can be used to engage agencies, diverse stakeholders, and the general public in strategy creation.

The United States also serves as a model for this blueprint, as there are many domestic national strategies addressing a range of topics. This report explores select U.S. national strategies on diverse issues from the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic to environmental justice. These strategies serve to illustrate the legal and policy mechanisms employed by domestic efforts to address important and complex social issues in need of federal coordination. Regardless of the motivation, these domestic strategies share key components and characteristics, including utilizing an organizing authority, incorporating stakeholder and public engagement, enshrining goals in a written document, and ensuring periodic updating. These mechanisms demonstrate the capacity of the U.S. political system to address complex issues, and these key components provide a framework for the features that should structure a national food strategy.

Presently, our food system struggles to serve the needs and interests of all Americans. The piecemeal policy and regulatory framework pertaining to food and agriculture also fails to accomplish needed improvements. Yet, the United States possesses the tools needed to address this vital system. A comprehensive and coordinated federal approach to law and policymaking is critical to an economically viable, resilient, equitable and food secure future for America. To that end, this report identifies four major principles to guide the creation of a national food strategy in the United States. Each principle describes the findings supporting it and includes a set of recommendations to lay the foundation for an effective comprehensive national strategy. In brief, these recommended principles are:

1. Coordination

Existing laws and regulations related to the food and agriculture system lack coordination and are sometimes inconsistent with one another. A national food strategy must coordinate existing laws and policies to strengthen the food system, address trade offs, and identify gaps. To accomplish those goals, a national food strategy should establish a lead agency or office with adequate funding to execute its mission, supported by the coordination of other key agencies engaged in food system regulation.

• Identify a lead office or agency and provide it with resources and the authority to compel engagement and action in the creation of the strategy. Lead authority to craft the strategy should be given to an office within the White House or a federal agency. This office should have the ability to convene, gather information, and compel other agencies to engage in the process.
• Create an interagency working group. This group could coordinate the key offices and agencies that oversee the laws and regulations that shape our food system, gather information from stakeholders, and oversee implementation of the strategy.
• Engage state, local, and tribal governments as key partners. State, local, and tribal governments are at the forefront of food system change, and the strategy should respect and support their creativity, as well as reflect their goals and priorities.

2. Participation

The current legislative and regulatory framework provides few opportunities for key stakeholders and the public to provide meaningful input, ultimately foreclosing consideration of their needs and interests. A successful national food strategy must incorporate views and insights from a diversity of key stakeholders. Moreover, the strategy should respond to their input, explain how it is being considered, and provide opportunities for ongoing feedback.

• Create an advisory council to engage those outside government in strategy development. An advisory council, made up of stakeholders from outside the federal government representing a broad range of perspectives would allow for varied expertise to support the creation of the strategy.
• Develop a multi-pronged approach for stakeholder and public participation and provide opportunities for feedback throughout the process. The strategy should offer ample options for public input. Specifically, stakeholders and the public should be included in the early stages of formation, before priorities have been set, and at key points during the strategy’s development.
• Respond to public input. The strategy should include public input at various stages and clearly respond to the public and stakeholder’s ideas and comments, explaining why one course of action has been chosen over another.

3. Transparency and Accountability

Americans increasingly desire transparency regarding the specifics of food production and processing. However, they often struggle to access and understand information about how laws and policies affect the food and agriculture system. A national strategy should provide the public with a robust platform for food system transparency, including information regarding how laws and policies shape the food system while offering multiple opportunities for public and stakeholder input.

• Create a written strategy document that includes priorities, goals, expected outcomes, implementation measures, and concrete metrics for measuring progress. The strategy should clearly articulate goals and explain how they are to be implemented and measured.
• Require publication of accessible, public-facing reports that measure progress against the strategy’s goals, metrics, and expected outcomes. The written strategy document should require regular reporting to evaluate progress and promote accountability. These reports should be both accessible and comprehensible to the general public.

4. Durability

Our vast and intricate food system is constantly changing, as are scientific knowledge and technology. Improvements to the food system will likely require commitment to long-term change. Consequently, a national food strategy must be both concrete, to set and achieve long-term goals, and flexible, to evolve.

• Ensure periodic updating of the strategy to reflect changing social, economic, scientific, and technological factors. The strategy should be updated periodically to evolve, responding to changing goals and new challenges, and reacting to critical developments in science and technology.
• Implement a procedural mechanism to guide agency decision-making. A procedural mechanism requiring consideration of food system impacts, like the National Environmental Policy Act (which requires agencies to consider environmental impacts of their actions), could ensure that agencies account for food system impacts when taking future actions.

Using these mechanisms to coordinate laws, policies, information, and perspectives related to the food system can serve to lay the framework for an effective and urgently needed comprehensive national food strategy that promotes the needs and interests of all Americans.

Acknowledgements

This report was produced in partnership between the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

We thank the following for their input and editing support: Laurie Ristino, Associate Professor of Law and  Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and Aurora Moses, Assistant Professor of Law and Clinical Staff Attorney of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. The following student members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic also contributed significant research and writing to this report: Mark Brennan, Drake Carden, Claudia Golden, Miranda Jones, Anthony Lombardi, Olivia Smith, and Conrad Zhong.

This report would not have been possible without the assistance, cooperation, and production support of Sarah Danly, Program Officer of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School, and Lihlani Skipper, Program Officer of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. In addition, we thank the following individuals for their assistance and support: Ona Balkus, Amber Leasure-Earnhardt, Jill Mahoney, Carrie Scrufari, Rebecca Valentine, Margot Hoppin, and Justin Teruya.