The Administration, working through the Council on Environmental Quality, should work together with leaders from the private sector, nongovernment organizations, USDA, other federal agencies, and state and local governments to develop strategic alliances to link urban and rural markets and foster joint development opportunities. A memorandum of understanding should be used to organize regional alliances and pilots emphasizing market research and expansion, technology development and transfer, collaborative approaches to ecosystem management, and other strategic ventures that support regions. In particular, federal and state agencies should partner with regional entrepreneurs to link urban consumers and rural producers through direct marketing channels for locally grown food. Such links would offer opportunities to protect farmland located in or near metropolitan areas while maintaining economically viable small farm production. These direct marketing opportunities can be promoted and enhanced by a variety of federal and state programs and activities, including community food security programs, community-supported agriculture, development of value-added processing and marketing enterprises, cooperatives, procurement policies, school meal programs and other institutional food systems, and farmers. markets. Success stories, lessons learned, and elements of success should be identified and evaluated for future replication.

Natural resource agencies, including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Natural Resources Conservation Service, should work together to bolster natural resource-based opportunities as part of regional sustainable community development efforts. Greater federal interagency cooperation is needed to help communities understand and incorporate opportunities to conserve and protect natural resources and ecosystems which are often decoupled from community and economic development strategies. These efforts should encompass both rural and urban areas. Although natural resources and the land base are viewed as rural, many jobs and processes that use these resources as raw materials are located in urban areas. Agencies should organize their collective enterprise development efforts; they should especially help expand the work of the Joint Center for Sustainable Communities with cities and counties nationwide on natural resource-based enterprise development. This work can help strengthen the linkages between rural and urban America and reinforce the connections between the environment and economic development.

USDA should take the lead in supporting efforts to protect farm, ranch, and forest lands through regional alliance. An alliance of organizations and agencies concerned with protecting historically rural lands threatened by conversion to other uses is forming around ecological and productivity concerns. Agencies could support research and analyses to more holistically characterize the issue from the perspectives of protecting farm, ranch, and forest lands. Agencies and other organizations could identify needed policy and program responses including expanded incentives to conserve .working lands. In urbanizing areas as well as at the edges of metropolitan areas. In particular, agencies and other organizations should evaluate the effectiveness of .Forest Banks and their adaptation to promote better management of other ecosystems and other natural resources. In addition, federal agencies will help sponsor and organize a national conference on Working Lands and Development in June 1999 as a follow-up to the National Town Meeting for a Sustainable America. This conference will aim to provide participants with a better understanding of problems, considerations, and opportunities from the perspectives of professionals and public officials involved in land use issues or related transportation, rural development, or urban development issues that influence land use. The federal government can help regions build more livable communities through the productive use of existing infrastructure and the conservation of critical natural resources on farm, ranch, and forest lands.