Qui, foie gras or baguette, will be the most popular dish next Christmas? This question, which might seem absurd, nevertheless sums up well the uncertainties that hang over our diet today. After the health crisis, the Ukrainian conflict is a new signal of the limits of our food model, and it is likely that these crises will not be the last. Our food is highly dependent on imports, on foodstuffs such as durum wheat or potatoes, but also on key inputs, in particular fossil fuels and fertilizers, which exposes it to supply disruptions and rising prices. Francis Blanche said that in everything “it is better to think about change than to change the bandage”and this is particularly the case here: thinking globally about the weaknesses of our food system, and how to remedy them, will be more effective than reacting on a case-by-case basis, one crisis after another, sector by sector .
How, then, can we strengthen our food resilience? How can we ensure that our food needs are met in the face of various future hazards, whether climatic, natural, industrial, sanitary or geopolitical?
Relocating agricultural production is not easy: French agricultural land has been halved since 1950, land yields are set to decrease due to climate change and decades of intensive agriculture. Finally, the agricultural population is weakening: the job of farmer, precarious, no longer attracts (20% of farmers had negative or zero income in 2017) and the costs of buying back farms are increasingly high…
However, many local solutions exist. Regions are now the most relevant scale for balancing local production and consumption. For this, we must make the idea of resilience work on both legs: autonomy and diversity. The first leg, autonomy, consists in producing sufficient quantities of products that are consumed locally, from the field to the plate, not forgetting to look, alongside agricultural products, at products processed by the agri-food industry. – they make up nearly 90% of our plates. The second leg of resilience is economic diversity, i.e. the ability of a territory to bounce back in the event of a crisis to rapidly increase production in the most fragile sectors by relying on its local assets, be it raw materials, skills or industrial tools. As was the case for masks and gel at the start of the Covid-19 crisis.
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