Emergencies, Disasters and Ohio’s Food System

COVID-19 highlighted notable systemic weaknesses across the food system in Ohio and the U.S. at large. Given the disruptions in the food system as part of their response to the pandemic in 2020, our OSU research team forged new partnerships with the Ohio Emergency Management Agency (Ohio EMA) Emergency Support Function (ESF) 6 (Mass Care) and ESF 11 (Food and Agriculture), and initiated a field mapping process to visualize and understand how Ohio state government agencies, civil society, nonprofits and the private sector intersect with the food system to respond to disasters in Ohio.

Analyzing interviews with state agencies and secondary data the team was able to map how food system-related policies interact with state-level agencies and organizations and visualize the administrative, political, and financial relationships between the initiating agency/organization of food policy and the target population of that policy   The overall goal of the project was to understand the system in which Ohio EMA is embedded in order to better plan and prepare for future emergencies, disasters and disruptions.