Bringing Local Food Home: Legal, Regulatory and Institutional Barriers to Local Food

Local food is in high demand and delivers many benefits to consumers and the local economy. Yet despite the strong demand for local food and a robust season supply, the market is not yet delivering local food due to a variety of systemic barriers. Bringing Local Food Home, written and researched by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, focuses on legal, regulatory, and institutional barriers to local food and reviews examples of how other jurisdictions have developed laws, regulations, and policies to overcome barriers similar to those currently faced by producers in the Greenbelt. 

Local food is in high demand and delivers many benefits to consumers and the local economy. Yet despite the strong demand for local food and a robust season supply, the market is not yet delivering local food due to a variety of systemic barriers.

One of the most commonly identified barriers is the highly centralized purchasing and distribution systems of a concentrated corporate structure and globalized food system, which emphasizes economies of scale. Other barriers discussed in this report include international or national trade agreements, country of origin labelling regulations, and the lack of local food labelling.

As this research makes clear, all of these barriers are surmountable. There is a wide variety of actions highlighted in this report that government policymakers and regulators at different levels could undertake to begin to address some of the barriers identified and respond to consumer demand for locally grown food. These actions would serve to promote local food and provide the conditions for a more sustainable local food economy in the Greenbelt.