WISCASSET, Maine — Coastal Enterprises Inc. announced it will launch a two-year feasibility study to identify the best ways to make Maine seafood more widely available to consumers.
The study will be done in partnership with Connecticut-based Wholesome Wave, a national nonprofit dedicated to linking local food producers to underserved communities. The two organizations met in Portland last week to discuss the venture, according to a media release.
CEI’s Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Program has been working with Wholesome Wave for the past year in an effort to deploy $3 million from the U.S. Treasury’s Healthy Food Finance Initiative into local “food hubs.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines a “food hub” as a “centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products.”
To date, however, the effort to rebuild local food systems has focused on agricultural products, according to Ron Phillips, CEI’s founder and president.
“Seafood is not well integrated into these discussions and efforts,” he said.
CEI and Wholesome Wave are working to change that.
“Our hope is that by looking at the existing patterns of seafood production, destination and use, we can investigate viable alternative distribution plans in collaboration with agricultural products,” said Hugh Cowperthwaite, director of CEI’s Fisheries Project team. “There is huge potential in creating efficiencies, stabilizing markets and developing new job opportunities within the entire distribution system.”
Wholesome Wave recently received a $568,000 joint grant from the USDA and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration as part of the Innovation Accelerator Challenge, a national initiative to support rural partnerships that support small businesses and farms.
The funding will allow Wholesome Wave’s Healthy Food Commerce Investments team to support “healthy food hubs” through capacity building, increasing access to financing, and providing technical business assistance and planning, the release said.
“We have developed a powerful collaboration with CEI in order to invest in healthy food hubs,” Daniel Ross, Wholesome Wave’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “Getting Maine seafood into New England food hubs will generate economic development and healthy food systems not just for the Maine seacoast but also for business throughout the region.”
$568,000! No wonder we’re broke! More Obama dollars hard at work!
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First of all, half a million is not a lot of money on the federal level.
Secondly, how can you criticize this grant? Did you read what it’s for
or just skim for the numbers before commenting? Third, the act that
funds this was passed by Republicans and Democrats working together in
Washington. It wasn’t some kind of special Obama plan. It’s a solution
our representatives worked together for to address the issues of waste
and inefficiencies in agriculture while building our manufacturing
capacities.
This grant is opening up new markets for Maine farmers, fishermen,
and more which will allow them to sell more goods in more areas. Due to
the increased demand, these Mainers will then be able to expand their
operations, which means they hire more people. Don’t forget to take into
account that geographically centered hubs cut the transportation cost
associated with the price of food and reduces the chance of spoilage
during transport (companies like Wal Mart don’t compensate farmers for
food spoiled during transport and processing which only hurts the
farmer/fisherman/etc)
There are so many obvious benefits to this grant. It focuses on
localization and efficiency (exactly what you’d want to encourage growth
in a sluggish economy.) Investments in infrastructure create jobs, grow
the economy, and provide future revenues. How can we pay the deficit
down if no one has a job to pay taxes or we stop generating future
revenues?
Has Obama made some questionable spending decisions? Definitely. Did
his policies crash the economy? Definitely not, the housing bubble did
that.
If you just plain don’t like the guy, that’s fine, and I have no
problem with people disliking him. It’s another matter to go around
claiming every spending measure that passes his administration is an
economy-wrecking policy or the reason we were in recession.
What I didn’t read here is the names of any fishing groups like Port Clyde that are already working day and night to market their products from the local level. Why weren’t they included in the grant?