Alaska Food Security

In our CEO's early career working as a Project Coordinator and Trainer at the National Institute for Standards and Technology - Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NIST-MEP) program's Alaska division she got to do what many people only dream of doing, travel Alaska. Between 2008 and 2012 she got the rare opportunity to visit over 14 rural communities and villages across the beautiful state she called home teaching ecommerce and financial literacy to indigenous artists and entrepreneurs. Sometimes that meant staying at an inn but most of the time it meant sleeping in someone's spare bedroom or on a cot in a villages community building. In almost every community she visited one thing remained constant, the cost of groceries from 'local retailers' were exorbitant and fresh food in the winter months was a rarity. Fast forward several years and these costs have only continued to climb.

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Our goal in this project is to use our drones to build on the community driven work already happening through programs like AgAlaska by Alaska Village Initiatives (AVI). AgAlaska aims to educate and support villagers in rural Alaska in climate relevant farming practices for both food security and food sovereignty purposes. AVI, who represents over 229 federally recognized tribes across the state, is looking to our drones to overcome the logistics barrier faced by the micro and small farmers they work with; creating a state-wide logistics network that not only supports the needs of farmers but of rural and urban residents and retailers.

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Such a network would address three key problems Alaska's logistics environment is facing while creating a mobile infrastructure system managed and monetized by the communities that deploy them rather than introducing yet another financial and quality of service stranglehold over a rural communities critical logistics by an outside company. These three key problem areas include:
 

1. Lack Of Equitable Access
   Rural Alaskans suffer lack of equitable access to fresh foods, low cost non-perishables,
   diversity of available hard goods, and pharmaceutical drug abuse due to necessity of bulk prescriptions combined with lack of accessible pharmaceutical care.
    

2. Poor Service From Limited Freight Options
   Current methods of freight shipping through the airlines from the city to the village more often than not result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of food perishing on frozen tarmacs in the winter, tens of thousands of dollars of damage from poor handling of food goods by airline and cargo carriers, and entire shipments of food going 'missing' in transfer and deconsolidation processes.
    

3. Under Investment In Local Infrastructure
   "Alaska Bypass removes an incentive for the state of Alaska to develop infrastructure to connect its rural residents." (USPS Office of Inspector General) "The Alaska Bypass program’s original purpose to provide affordable and reliable service to rural Alaskans and help the Postal Service operate more efficiently has morphed into a program that puts the Postal Service in the position of financially supporting the aviation industry, the State of Alaska, bush merchants, and others."

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