Policy and Food Systems

The institutional context. USDA conservation programs, EU CAP, FAO/IPCC frameworks, true cost accounting, food-sovereignty principles, federal-state-tribal coordination.

This section grounds the rest of the catalog in the public-program context that material to almost every U.S. and European transition plan. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are the two largest U.S. federal conduits for paying landowners to adopt soil-health and conservation practices. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, in its post-2023 architecture with eco-schemes paying farmers for specified ecological practices, is the European counterpart.

Concept entries here keep the political-economy vocabulary precise. Food sovereignty, the La Vía Campesina-derived concept, is distinguished from food security and presented neutrally so the reader can engage policy debates that use the term without being captured by a single political position. Hidden Costs of Agrifood Systems — the FAO’s $10–12 trillion annual figure — connects nearly every other section in the graph and answers why regenerative finance arguments hold together at the macro scale. Local and Regional Food Systems covers the institutional middle ground (USDA AMS, regional food business centers, food hubs) between hyperlocal CSAs and national-brand commodity supply.

The section is deliberately the smallest in the catalog by entry count. The book does not lobby; it does not condemn particular agribusiness firms; it does not endorse a political party’s farm-bill positions. Practitioner-level neutrality is required for the audience to trust the catalog. Where a reader needs deeper political-economy treatment, the book points to Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, Olivier De Schutter’s UN-rapporteur reports, and Holt-Giménez’s Food Movements Unite! in the Sources sections of these entries — without taking the political-position-first posture the book reserves for empirical questions.