Farmers Markets Bring Together Communities in Mississippi Delta

In 1993, a new administration in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's fourth largest city, declared food access a fundamental citizen right. The city government partnered with rural farmers to bring fresh food into the city limits, make produce more affordable, and ensure healthy options are distributed to all members of the population, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Following the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, a group of women took the initiative to ensure that the food they consume meets radiation standards twice as strict as the government's. The Seikatsu Club formed in 1965 and has since built itself up to 400,000 members (about 90% of whom are women) and works with 200 producers. The group is highly productive: they run their own milk factory, join with worker collectives to sell goods like jam or cookies, operate a fund for farmers whose products are tainted, offer child and elder care, and much more. Seikatsu is a success due to its local citizens' control.

The food-supply business is known for exploitative pay and poor working conditions. But Brooklyn Packers, a Black-owned cooperative launched in 2016, pays its owner-workers and vendors fair wages and is founded on traditions in the Black community of food sovereignty and mutual aid. Those values paid off at the start of the pandemic, when demand for fresh produce deliveries exploded. Brooklyn Packers retooled its business model to meet the demand, showing that a non-hierarchical business can move quickly.

Food hub projects are gaining momentum in Hawaii as a means to connect farmers with customers. The projects go against the narrative that produce should be sold to big-box supermarkets, and instead focuses on "allowing farmers to concentrate on farming and creating a seamless ordering system so consumers can order food online for delivery or availability at central pickup points."

The Quapaw tribe runs the Downstream Casino Resort in Oklahoma where they combine Indigenous food and farming knowledge with modern hotel operations. They have seven greenhouses and two gardens with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs that cultivate about 6,000 pounds of food per year for the hotel and casino. They also have their own meat packing and processing plant, coffee roasting program, brewery, and farmers market. By creating a system of locally sourced and sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their land and food sovereignty.

The Life Do Grow Farm in Philadelphia, run by the nonprofit Urban Creators, is a two-acre plot that yields food needed to feed the community who might not be able to make ends meet. Since June, the farm has distributed 65,000 pounds of produce, along with free children’s meals. But the farm is also a community gathering space for artists and entrepreneurs. While the land’s lease runs out in 2022, the nonprofit hopes to own it and highlight it as a “reimagination of city land, a radical collaboration in the service of empowering Black and brown communities in North Central Philly,” said the farm manager.

Urban Tilth, an urban farm in California, is providing food directly to communities in need and upending the traditional food supply chain so they can help people access healthy and sustainably-grown food. They have been providing local organic food to 190 families financially impacted by COVID-19, almost six times more food they’ve distributed since the pandemic began.

A nonprofit grocery store in Washington, D.C. brings fresh, affordable food to regional food deserts. Through community engagement, public partnerships, and the willingness to learn from failure, Good Food Markets brings small grocery stores into communities that need them most.

The creation, support and development of farmers' markets around the United States lends itself to the economic empowerment of women and minority growers. From Seattle to Philadelphia, these small public markets make breaking into the food business accessible to more people on the economic scale, a hard goal to accomplish for larger grocery store chains.

Denver Urban Gardens transformed vacant urban lots into 26 food forests containing over 1,200 fruit trees and berry bushes, providing free fresh produce to communities while reducing local temperatures by 5-15 degrees and increasing tree canopy coverage in one of America's least forested cities.