Policymakers have dedicated increasing attention to whether Americans have access to healthful food. As a result, various methods for measuring food store access at the national level have been developed to identify areas that lack access. However, these methods face definitional, data, and methodological limitations. The focus on neighborhoods instead of individuals underestimates the barriers that some individuals face in accessing healthy food, and overestimates the problem in other neighborhoods. This paper reviews and critiques currently available national‐level measures of food access. While multiple measures of food access are needed to understand the problem, we recommend greater attention be paid to individual measures of food store access.
This article determines the relative technical efficiency of rural- and urban-influenced crop/livestock enterprises in the Corn Belt. Farmers in urban-influenced locations are less technically efficient than farmers in rural locations. During 1998–2000, stochastic production frontier procedures indicate that a 10% increase in urban influence leads to a close to 4% decrease in technical efficiency. The most successful urban-influenced farms have controlled costs as effectively as rural farms. They have tended to de-emphasize that nondairy livestock activities—particularly beef and hogs—do not rely extensively on off-farm income, and have relatively large, less residential/lifestyle operations compared to less successful urban-influenced farmers. However, our statistical analysis clearly bears out the refrain in popular literature that urban proximity raises the cost for, and decreases the viability of, traditional farms. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
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