CENET Track Sessions

This session explores the distribution of income and wealth in rural America and how the dynamics of wealth and income inequality are affected by the trajectories of natural resource use in different regions.

The local food movement has received a great deal of recent attention from policy makers and consumers because of the potential it holds for food quality, health attributes, the environment, and community development. But, the hard evidence of positive outcomes is not well-established. The local foods movement is relatively young and local foods do not constitute a large segment of the U.S. food market. In addition, little is understood about the behavioral motivations driving consumer spending on locally grown foods. A role for our profession is to provide the evidence to quantify these links in a rigorous manner.