Durham County is preparing to assess its food system and create a 10-year plan to ensure food security.
Durham’s Board of County Commissioners approved a $159,547 contract Monday with Key Environmental Consulting, which will develop a food system assessment and strategic plan over 18 months. The goals for the strategic plan include ensuring access to affordable, safe, and nutritious food that meets dietary needs and food preferences; assessing the conditions and job opportunities for people working in Durham’s food industries; and using environmentally-friendly practices to protect waterways and wildlife.
Durham is slightly below the food insecurity average of 15 percent in North Carolina, with 13.8 percent of residents have limited or uncertain access to adequate food, according to 2023 data from Feeding America. However, food insecurity rates are much higher for children, as well as Black people and Latinos, in comparison with Durham’s average (18.3 percent for children, 26 percent for Black people, and 22 percent for Latinos).
“The Durham County government and our community members do so much for food security,” says Raina Bunnag, NC Cooperative Extension food security coordinator. “There’s always tons of efforts going on, but we never have enough resources or enough staff or enough volunteers. So, this will help us to understand really how to prioritize projects and how to better use the resources, both, again, internally and throughout the county, to make bigger change together.”
Key Environmental Consulting, which has experience working in Durham, will conduct a spatial analysis of food access that will detail the grocery stores and markets in Durham, farms and other food production sites in and near the county, and how food is distributed in Durham.
The vendor will also review policies at the local, state, and national levels to determine the best strategies to deal with food insecurity. The findings will be used to evaluate Durham’s current efforts.
The first six months of the project, which is expected to begin early next year, will be dedicated to meeting with Key Environmental Consulting as it creates a project plan. A steering committee will also be formed to help lead the assessment activities.
Starting around the third month, data collection and spatial analysis will begin. The last six months will be dedicated to developing the 10-year strategic plan, getting community feedback, revising the plan based on feedback, and publishing it.
Bunnag says the county has ramped up its already “significant food security investment” in recent years. The county has invested more than $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) food security projects, as a result of federal stimulus money during the pandemic.
Emergency planning will be another focus of the strategic plan.
The federal government shutdown, which disrupted Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 32,529 people in Durham, reinforced the need to have emergency planning, Bunnag says.
“I think it’s great timing for a lot of reasons, but that is one part that I will be glad for us to have some data and recommendations around,” Bunnag says.
Donna Rewalt, director of Durham County Center of NC Cooperative Extension said during Monday’s county commissioners’ meeting that food insecurity ebbs and flows, like it did with the 2008 recession and pandemic.
“We are used to a mill of different crises happening, and so there’s never a right time to do something, but now is a good time for us to really be looking more deeply at this work so it can help us to be more prepared in the future,” Rewalt said.
Comment on this story at [email protected].