Linking sustainable practices throughout Europe
The Redon Sustainable Food Consortium
Rural topic(s): Local food Chains
Type: Innovative experience
Date of writing: December 14, 2020
Text:
Xavier Hamon of the Redon Sustainable Food Consortium highlighted an important point in relation to the political impact of the local food movement: creating change is about more than the accumulation of good food initiatives as this alone does not necessarily lead to systemic transformation.
Much like the Nantes Cattle Festival where the project originated, the idea of the Sustainable Food Consortium is to bring together people from all backgrounds and create space for discussion at local level. It is about creating a food culture, people re-engaging in the democratic process and realising that this can create a more powerful food transition than a government food policy imposed from the top-down, or pale imitations of real citizen initiatives. Xavier cited predatory threats to CSA, to land trusts and so on in his presentation – initiatives that look bottom up and citizen controlled but are in fact privatised and proprietary.
Redon as a place generates a large agricultural output but there is little room for local projects to develop, with a lack of local production and processing facilities and land grabbing issues among the inhibiting factors. The re-localisation of local food processing facilities is therefore important to the Redon Sustainable Food Consortium, done on food sovereignty terms and not in a top down manner. The relevance of this objective in other European regions was noted by a number of the event’s participants.
Notes:
Extract from ARC2020’s article: www.arc2020.eu/regional-rural-responses-reimagined/
« Local Food – Reimagining Regional Responses was about sharing the ideas of innovative communities that are experimenting with ways to shorten, amplify and democratise food supply chains with a view to exploring how such approaches might be replicated, scaled up and scaled across.
Pioneering initiatives, impressive in size and ambition, ethos and impact joined us: Peri-urban Oosterwold, DESIRA, the Redon Sustainable Food Consortium, La Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise and Cloughjordan Community Farm. Equally noteworthy were the 100+ participants who tuned in generously to share knowledge, inspiration and food for thought, continuing the quest to re-imagine our regional responses for a better food system. »
Contact:
« Pays de Redon » agri-food network :redon-agglomeration.bzh/consortium-alimentation-durable
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Informations:
Scale of intervention : Regional
Keywords: food souvereignty, local food processing, local food systems
Places: France
Actors: multi-stakeholders, farmer, consumer, citizen, local community