THE FOOD SAFETY POLICY GAP: ESSAYS ON EMERGENCY FOOD IN NORTH CAROLINA

In an effort to detail, describe, categorize, and analyze the emergency food system of North Carolina, this research presents three essays focused on food pantry procedures as related to food safety. Given the focus on food insecurity, food safety is often a lower priority for food pantries; however, foodborne illness is a serious problem that affects 1 in 6 Americans each year. The first essay identifies and catalogues the standard operating procedures of 105 North Carolina food pantries, comparing those who partner with a formal food bank to those that operate independently, metropolitan with rural pantries, and food pantry managers who did and did not complete training in food safety. The second essay documents the food pantry supply chain and channels of distribution and evaluates them using a risk framework created specifically for emergency food. The results of the negative binomial analysis suggest that pantries that participate in a federal commodity program like TEFAP employ less risky practices, both in transport and storage (p<0.01). The third essay employs a difference-in-difference design to analyze new online food safety guidelines created based on the results of the first essay. Its null findings on modified North Carolina Food Establishment Inspection Report questions suggest that further research is required in order to improve food safety at food pantries, while paired t-tests on an isolated sample suggest the online guidelines can be effective when viewing the guidelines is required and/or guaranteed. The overall findings of this research provide insight to the practices and supply chain of the North Carolina emergency food system, add to the literature at the cross-section of food safety, food security, and nutrition, and allowed for the creation of best practices guidelines specific to food pantries.Doctor of Philosoph

Food Safety Education and Disparities in North Carolina Emergency Food

Each year, an estimated 48 million Americans (1 in 6) contract foodborne illness (Scallan, 2011) stemming from grocery stores, hospitals, day care centers, church banquets, county fairs, restaurants, private homes, schools, and even food banks (CDC FOOD, 2011). However, little research has explored the potential connection between food-insecure populations and risk of foodborne illness, especially for emergency foods (c.f. Henley et al., 2012; Koro et al., 2010; Quinlan, 2013). For the majority of people who seek food assistance, food pantries are a fixed part of food sources; that is, the pantries are for subsistence and no longer just “emergency food” (Feeding America, 2010). Food pantries in North Carolina, like in many states, exist in a regulatory desert outside of food inspection requirements at any level of government, leaving pantry managers and volunteers serving a vulnerable population without written operating procedures, formal food handling training, or guidance regarding foodborne illness risk. In North Carolina, there are approximately 2,500 food pantries, many that partner with local Feeding America food banks and others that operate completely independently, many that receive food donations from numerous local and distant sources each week, and all that operate outside the traditional food system. With an ardent concentration on food access and availability, the managers who run the pantries have varying levels of food safety education. This mixed-methods research is compiled from interviews and observations in 105 urban, rural, and suburban food pantries in 12 counties across North Carolina and explores the dissimilarities within its food pantry system.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fss2015/1002/thumbnail.jp

Closing the access gap for health innovations: an open licensing proposal for universities

BACKGROUND: This article centers around a proposal outlining how research universities could leverage their intellectual property to help close the access gap for health innovations in poor countries. A recent deal between Emory University, Gilead Sciences, and Royalty Pharma is used as an example to illustrate how 'equitable access licensing' could be put into practice. DISCUSSION: While the crisis of access to medicines in poor countries has multiple determinants, intellectual property protection leading to high prices is well-established as one critical element of the access gap. Given the current international political climate, systemic, government-driven reform of intellectual property protection seems unlikely in the near term. Therefore, we propose that public sector institutions, universities chief among them, adopt a modest intervention – an Equitable Access License (EAL) – that works within existing trade-law and drug-development paradigms in order to proactively circumvent both national and international obstacles to generic medicine production. Our proposal has three key features: (1) it is prospective in scope, (2) it facilitates unfettered generic competition in poor countries, and (3) it centers around universities and their role in the biomedical research enterprise. Two characteristics make universities ideal agents of the type of open licensing proposal described. First, universities, because they are upstream in the development pipeline, are likely to hold rights to the key components of a wide variety of end products. Second, universities acting collectively have a strong negotiating position with respect to other players in the biomedical research arena. Finally, counterarguments are anticipated and addressed and conclusions are drawn based on how application of the Equitable Access License would have changed the effects of the licensing deal between Emory and Gilead

Implementation of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) in school and community gardens

Interest in school and community gardens has increased over the past decade as a method to connect students and communities with food production. Although data on gardens as a source for foodborne illness is scarce, growing practices and settings are similar to those in small-scale commercial production. The objectives of this study were to (1) create a set of evidence-based best practices for gardens based on established food safety guidance for fresh produce, (2) create an intervention for delivery, and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of the practices. The guidelines were designed to impact garden organizer and volunteer behavior as well as organizational infrastructure regarding site selection, soil testing, handwashing, water, composting, garden design and fencing, sanitation, and volunteer management. School and community gardens (n = SO, 10 of each] were visited twice, using a pre-post design, and a risk-based observation instrument was administered. Sixteen gardens (80%) improved their overall scores. While the findings demonstrated that handwashing behavior could be altered significantly (P < 0.01) through the provision of the designed intervention, they also suggest a suitable means to take steps toward a safer garden

Green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of imposed innovation for the wellbeing of rural smallholders

Green Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefited smallholders in southern Asia and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda’s Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods, multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than ‘‘induced innovation”. The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade, and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages, and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be pro-poor or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people