At Bread for the World, we define food systems as the activities and resources necessary to bring food from its source – farms, ranches, and oceans – to people’s forks. As faithful advocates seeking to shape policies that end hunger and improve lives, we must also be concerned with how the food that nourishes us arrives on our plates and support programs that help accomplish this.
Building effective food systems is part of the solution, and we should preserve or restart approaches – like cultivating stronger local and regional food systems – that have worked well in the past, especially in times of emergency.
Enter the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Celebrating 162 years of existence (as of May 15, 2025), the USDA plays a critical role in managing American agricultural supply chains and our domestic food system. Its responsibilities also include ensuring that the food and nutritional needs of Americans are met. This is through programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and school meals, which Bread has supported for decades. The USDA also plays a critical role in ensuring that our food system is safe for consumers, especially for products like meat, poultry, and eggs.
When the Covid-19 pandemic reached the United States, it wreaked havoc on our domestic agricultural supply chains, causing some farmers to leave their foods in the fields while food bank demand skyrocketed. Farm workers and poultry workers were especially vulnerable to the virus, and when many stayed home due to sickness or to protect themselves and their families, it revealed how reliant our food system is on workers who often lack labor protections.
During the 2019-2020 school year, schools served nearly 30 million students with free and reduced-price lunches and 14.7 million students with free and reduced-priced breakfasts. To no one’s surprise, closing schools did not reduce students’ need to eat. Had Congress not acted with sweeping legislation, like the CARES Act of 2020, which authorized waivers for school meal delivery, and the American Rescue Plan of 2021, which funded several USDA supply chain efforts, American schools, food banks, and farms would have buckled under the pressure of these disruptions.
Two programs that responded to this moment were LFS and LFPA – the Local Food for Schools (LFS) and Local Food Purchasing Assistance (LFPA) Cooperative Agreement Programs. LFS was designed to support states in improving school meal quality and child nutrition, and LFPA supported state, tribal, and territorial governments with purchasing healthy, local foods to support food banks and supply chain resiliency. At the center of every cooperative agreement were two goals: making sure farmers and producers had better market access, and that children and families had healthier, fresher food to eat. The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) and the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) were responsible for bringing these efforts online for the American people.
And it worked! A June 2023 report from the Wallace Center at Winrock International highlighted that LFPA, in its early stages, had a positive and demonstrable impact on local farms and food businesses, especially those operated by socially disadvantaged farmers. LFPA also helped to get fresh, healthy, and culturally appropriate foods into communities struggling with food insecurity.
An October 2024 report completed for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction found that more than 250 local farmers were served by their state’s LFS program. In Colorado, schools were buying a wide range of fresh fruits and vegetables, including chili peppers, onions, tomatoes, peaches, zucchini, and high-quality proteins like beef and bison. Pasture-raised beef, organic yogurt, and local fruits and vegetables were on the menu in Texas.
Recent reporting has shown that LFPA dollars across Tribal nations were used to buy local bison, beef, and produce in Montana, and locally sourced eggs and produce in Nevada. This was in addition to other investments made by the USDA Office of Tribal Relations (OTR), like the Bison Purchase Pilot Program for the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Given the high rates of food insecurity in tribal nations, as reported by the GAO, these investments were game changing.
But in March 2025, USDA announced the cancellation of more than $1 billion in local food purchasing for LFS, LFPA, and supplemental funding for food banks. Food banks across the country missed out on truckloads of deliveries because of this reduction in funding. Before this cut in funding, Americans had seen the federal government tackle hunger and food insecurity with the urgency and resources necessary to meet the moment. There are so many households and classrooms across the U.S. and in Tribal nations that still need these investments.
The USDA, under the leadership of Secretary Brooke Rollins, should keep investing in local and regional foods and maintain schools and food banks as stable markets for local farmers and producers. This did make America healthier, especially children who received nutritious school meals and households who used food banks to get by. Our elected and appointed leaders must do all they can to end hunger in all its forms, and they have already successful models to pull from. Building stronger local and regional food systems that serve schools and food banks is an excellent place to restart this important work.
Sakeenah Shabazz is Deputy Director, Policy and Research Institute (PRI), with Bread for the World.
