Publications

UB researchers were the driving force behind “Local government planning for community food systems” a report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a United Nations agency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. The 164-page report details strategies local governments in low- and middle-income countries can use to create more innovative and equitable community food systems.

"This contributed volume motivates and educates across fields about the major challenges in global health and the interdisciplinary strategies for solving them. Once the purview of public health, medicine, and nursing, global health is now an interdisciplinary endeavor that relies on expertise from anthropology to urban planning, economics to political science, geography to engineering. Scholars and practitioners in the health sciences are seeking knowledge from a wider array of fields while, simultaneously, students across majors have a growing interest in humanitarian issues and are pursuing knowledge and skills for impacting well-being across geographic and disciplinary borders."

Published in 2020, Jill Clark, Brian Conley, & Samina Raja’s article Essential, fragile, and invisible community food infrastructure: The role of urban governments in the United States, provides a national overview of how urban local governments engage in food systems policy work across the United States. Drawing on a national survey of urban planners by the Growing Food Connections initiative housed at the UB Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab, the authors suggest that although local urban governments utilize a range of policy tools they are overregulating and underinvesting in food systems. Food production and retail and service sectors receive more attention, while middle infrastructure – or intermediated markets that connect production with consumption and builds larger markets, thereby diversifying the food system and building resiliency – receive less attention.