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Financial reforms: ensure adequate financial support of DFS through diverse public and private sources; impose carbon taxes on fossil fuel inputs to discourage long-distance transportation and agro-chemicals; impose toxicity taxes on chemical inputs. Regulatory reforms: make and enforce rules to internalize environmental and social costs while avoiding disproportionate costs for smaller farmers; design food safety regimes that allow diversified farming; harmonize regulations to reduce costs of compliance by diversified farmers. Planning and land-use changes: use municipal zoning to remove development pressures on peri-urban diversified farms; encourage farming within urban areas; foster landscape-scale planning. Infrastructure development: build local processing plants and local food aggregation systems and strengthen direct marketing systems to better meet the needs of diversified farming and counter agri-business power over supply chains. Procurement and nutrition support: preferences for DFS in government purchasing and expansion of nutrition and public health programs to include DFS-sourced foods. Antitrust enforcement: curb monopolistic and oligopolistic power (“food trusts”) in food supply chains; weaken market concentration and retailer control across all food categories. Campaign finance controls: eliminate unrestricted political donations; prevent agri-business corporations from contributing to political action committees. Farm Bill reforms: redirect publically financed subsidies for industrialized agriculture to support sustainable agriculture and DFS at the landscape scale. |
| Sources: Pretty 1995, Buttel 2006, NAS 2010. |