Exploring the relationships between local agrifood system resilience, multiple measures of development, and health in the Southern United States

ABSTRACT

Resilience has become an increasingly popular concept, with numerous frameworks to address a range of topics. Among other approaches, constructing domain-specific measures focused on the local level provides opportunities to explore the relationships between resilience and development concerns like inequality, poverty, health, and efforts to improve wellbeing. Informed by livelihoods, community capitals, and resilience literature, and using publicly available county-level data, this article explores the associations between agrifood system indicators, broader socioeconomic development, and health in the Southern US. Of interest are the associations between socioeconomic status, social capital, agrifood system resilience, traditional food desert measures, and population health outcomes of self-rated health and premature age-adjusted mortality. Regression analysis demonstrates that local agrifood system resilience is associated with population health. This study helps scholars, practitioners, and policy analysts to have a more nuanced understanding of the ways development of local agrifood systems intersect with broader community development goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• local agrifood systems
• health
• regional development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. From the eight dimensions making up the CLIMATED framework, five of them were included in the local agrifood system sustainability/resilience index analyzed later in this article: connectivity, local self-organization, maintenance, ecological integrity, and diversity.

2. We do recognize that there are grocery stores and supercenters selling local and regional produce, and these provide important markets for producers and access points for fresh foods for consumers. Additionally, there are specialized grocery stores emphasizing local and regional sourcing. However, the existing standardized data on grocery stores and supercenters do not differentiate between these kinds of stores, and our analysis is based on the assumption that most grocery stores and supercenters primarily sell food from outside of their communities and are not highly influenced by local community action.

3. As noted by one of the reviewers commenting on a previous version of this manuscript, there is a strong relationship between race and health outcomes, and this is certainly the case in the Southern US. We elected to exclude racial composition (i.e. percent of the population Black/African American) from our final models because of problems with multicollinearity. This is due to the strong associations between race, poverty, and metropolitan status. (For more discussion of these important patterns, see: Green, 2014; Green & Mitra, 2013.)

4. Some authors capitalize the titles for the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and the Community Capitals Framework. We elected not to do this because of the general nature of the review and the range of different approaches covered and synthesized in this article.

5. This literature review benefitted from the peer-reviewers and editorial teams for this Community Resilience special issue and author Green’s participation in the International Conference on the Deep Roots of Economic Growth: The Roles of Geography, History, and Institutions held in Naples, Italy. We are indebted to all who contributed critical feedback.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the US Department of Agriculture, Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (sub-award number RD 309-134/S001078).