Title: Bringing Local Food Home: Legal, Regulatory and Institutional Barriers to Local Food
Author: Maureen Carter-Whitney
Date: December 2008
Published by: Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation - Occasional Paper Series
Description: Ontario's Greenbelt, covering 1.8 million acres from Niagara Falls to Tobermory to Peterborough, contains some of the most fertile farmland in Canada including the Holland Marsh and the Niagara Peninsula tender fruit and grape area. There are over 7,000 farms whose production capacity and proximity to urban areas present a unique opportunity to feed Ontario’s diverse population. Despite the strong demand for local food and a robust seasonal supply, the market is not yet delivering local food to the extent that consumers want it due to a variety of systemic barriers. This paper examines a sub-set of those barriers—those arising out of laws, regulations or international agreements. As the research makes clear, all of these barriers are surmountable, and some specific actions to be taken by policymakers to overcome them are identified.
