Coming together to accelerate the agricultural and food transition

The agricultural and food transition is underway, driven by a wide variety of committed actors. To accelerate this fundamental movement and consolidate a “transition ecosystem”, we are convinced that setting up strong cooperation is a necessity.

Various actors are now involved in the agricultural and food transition. Whether they are associations, start-ups, research units, local authorities, cooperatives or large companies, many are innovating for more sustainable food.

This proliferation of initiatives is reinforced by a growing awareness among citizens of ecological and societal issues. The result is a growing demand for products from sustainable supply chains, but also cleavages and competition phenomena, which can lead to risks for the transition movement as a whole.

The diversity of messages, new products, and ideological postures that run through this emerging community of actors in the agricultural and food transition, sometimes prevents us from seeing clearly and perceiving the complementarities and specificities.

Creating meeting spaces to promote synergies

The consultation process, organized within the framework of the General Assembly on Food (EGA), has shown the ability of the actors of the transition to produce coherent and resolutely progressive proposals, as was the case in the 14 EGA workshops in 2017.
This need for exchange is also embodied in the dynamics of many territories in France and Spain. These often rely on long-term consultation spaces open to the various stakeholders to reshape their farming and food methods. The 6th Conference on Local Food Transitions, organised in Bréal-sous-Montfort as part of the Atlass project led by CIVAM Bretagne, on 13 November 2018, was an illustration of this.

This is also one of the reasons for the success of the 1st Territorial Conference on Agro-Ecological Transition and Sustainable Food, which was held in Montpellier on 5 and 6 February 2019, as well as the development of the Network of Agro-Ecological Cities in Spain.
Whether local or national, such spaces are necessary to create constructive relationships between different families of actors sharing common values, to overcome preconceptions, to identify both possible convergences and differences to be respected, and finally to consolidate a community of actors working in the same direction, taking advantage of each other’s strengths.

The Sustainable Food Meetings, an event to inspire the transition

It is on the basis of this same observation that we organised, with various partners, the second edition of our Sustainable Food Meetings on 29 January in Paris. A key objective guides us: to encourage new meetings and exchanges between the 700 participants and to promote the diversity of initiatives and innovations. We also shared the results of recent work, and illustrated the diversity of sustainable food issues (ecology, social justice, employment, health, etc.).

All the information you need to “relive” the 2nd Sustainable Food Meetings will be available at the beginning of April.

Sharing knowledge and experiences

Sharing knowledge from various initiatives and experiments remains a key factor in accelerating the transition. The strengthening of the local scale (short circuits, local food policies, etc.) is supported by a majority of actors and citizens. Many initiatives contribute to this and deserve to be known and disseminated. Innovations and successes too often remain local and discreet, which hinders their resumption in other territories, while action on the ground contains a great richness, both in terms of social, organizational and technical innovations.

Convinced of the importance of these experiences, in 2018 we conducted a participatory exercise to “collect learning” on territorialized food systems, in order to identify the questions and difficulties shared by local authorities, associations and SSE actors, and to share the answers of each initiative.

We invite you to discover the results of this analysis here.

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Photo © Pierre-Yves Brunaud

Photo © Judith Sanso Menorca