A baseline assessment of school food spending and local procurement: exploring the case of CO HB 19-1132 and other public policies

Abstract

Many agricultural and food system policies are enacted to support positive economic development. Yet, there may be tradeoffs associated with certain types of policies particularly between efficiency and both positive and negative externalities. To test this, we investigate the role of local and regional supply chains in generating local economic development (an example of a positive externality). School nutrition programs are a rich context for this study because they engage with a variety of supply chain pathways, have garnered increasing attention from advocates of institutional procurement in recent years, and many of them have Farm-to-School programs, which produce local economic development benefits according to previous studies. We use an optimization model to test for what we coin the "Efficiency-Externality Tradeoff" specifically looking at how the supply chain by which agricultural products arrive to a school impact both efficiency and local economic development outcomes. We find that in the absence of policy mechanisms, school districts are unlikely to participate in local food procurement, which previous work has documented has a positive impact on local economies. This finding has implications for economic development policies, particularly those targeted at improving the quality of life in agriculturally dependent areas via institutional procurement in a school setting.