Brianna Johnson-King is a law student enrolled in the Harvard Law School Food Law & Policy Clinic and guest contributor on this blog. COVID-19 has disrupted food supply chains, impacting farmers looking for butchers, meat processing facilities shutting down, and consumers concerned with availability and prices of meat at the grocery store. This disruption has led to potentially questionable conduct…
Stephanie Kelemen is a law student enrolled in the Harvard Law School Food Law & Policy Clinic and guest contributor on this blog. Buried deep in the 2018 Farm Bill, under the Conservation title, Congress established a peculiar program with $75m of mandatory funding: the Feral Swine Eradication and Control Pilot Program. Prior to encountering this Section, I had never…
Clara Geffroy is a law student at NYU School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. Congress recently passed a continuing resolution (CR) extending about $1.4 trillion in government funding until December 11, 2020. This comes after a period of conflicting political interests regarding a full replenishment of the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which provides funding to the United…
Mariana Munera is a law student at NYU School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. The USDA Farmers to Families Program is now entering its fourth round of funding with an additional $500 Million in funding. The program originally started as a way to bridge the gap between farmers, who lost business from restaurants, hotels, and other sources…
Ava Cilia is a law student in the Harvard Law School Food Law & Policy Clinic and guest contributor on this blog. Between 1910 and 1998 Black Americans lost about 90% of their farmland. Along with decades of notably racist practices by USDA, white supremacist violence, and the Great Migration, this disturbing trend is partially the result of the lack…
Oscar Heanue is a law student in the Food Law & Policy Clinic of Harvard Law School and guest contributor on this blog. Thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Online Purchasing Pilot, participants in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) are now able to use their benefits online for the first time in the program’s history. However, although…
Julia Harvey is a law student at NYU School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. On September 9, 2020, USDA announced a new final rule that aligns egg safety inspection practices with those already used in other USDA-regulated industries including meat and poultry. The rule requires egg production facilities to develop and implement Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point…
Tanya Shahjanian is a law student at NYU School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. As the COVID-19 pandemic—and the resulting economic instability—persist into the fall season, underserved populations in the United States continue to suffer financially. Food insecurity remains high, and millions of families continue to rely on various federal food assistance programs to get by. Fears…
Katie Smith is a law student at NYU School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. COVID-19 is forcing the United States to become an even more internet-dependent society, and rural and Tribal communities are increasingly being left behind. As of 2016, over 30% of rural Americans and over 35% of Americans living on Tribal lands did not have…
Alexander Langer is a law student at NYU School of Law and guest contributor on this blog. After years of steadily rising global food security, more people will go hungry this year because of COVID-19 and the related global economic crisis. However, the global food system that is so vulnerable to these shocks continues to chug along, and U.S. global…