Closer connections for stong local resilience

Even in France, where food is officially a national heritage asset, consumers have been seduced by the advantages of ready meals for some decades now. Processed foods have taken over from fresh ingredients, pumping the latter with preservatives and additives. The market has been industrialised and globalised, distancing producers and consumers. In a highly urbanised country such as France, the relationship between people, food and agriculture has undergone a profound change. And, as one crisis succeeds another and poor practices in the agrifood industry are exposed, a degree of distrust has crept into the relationship. 
Meanwhile, the ongoing environmental debate has revealed quite how far agriculture is both perpetrator and victim of environmental pollution and degradation. Fortunately, though, farming can also help to remedy the situation. In the current cultural space, where tensions and doubts over production practices abound, the spread of digital in farming is reconfiguring the relationships between actors by taking out the middlemen and strengthening direct relationships between consumers and farmers. It is also introducing tools to restore confidence and ensure transparency in what is becoming a shared management of the environment.

Closer links in new value chains

The prevalence of online orders and deliveries via the websites of major distributors, or direct sales platforms for local producers, such as la Ruche qui dit Oui and Locavor in France, means that online hubs now form part of our daily lives. According to Isabelle Piot-Lepetit, Scientific Director at #DigitAg, “Value chains are changing as the result of digital, shaped by all those involved, from field to fork. The disruption stems from the fact that our chains are turning into multi-directional networks. A farmer can simultaneously supply supermarkets, specialist shops or private customers. Platforms allow users to cut out the middle man, to the benefit of both consumers and producers.” Digital can thus offer genuine opportunities to farmers to find and create a loyal client base that knows about their farming methods. At the other end of what is often a shorter chain, it helps consumers to make choices on the basis of their greater knowledge of production methods. 
Responding to strong public demand, traceability for human and animal foodstuffs has been mandatory in France since 2002. Shop shelves are packed with engaging stories on food sources, contents and methods of production, and consumers are dazzled by an array of certification labels, some might say to the point of confusion. While it does the job of raising consumer confidence levels, traceability also gives power to the newly-informed consumer. When consumers make choices concerning free-range and organic farming methods, local suppliers, environmental footprints or fair payment to farmers, they influence the supply system. “The chain is now being reversed, with consumers driving the process. For example, the C’est qui le patron? (who’s the boss?) initiative makes sure that all its products are created, selected and tested by the consumers within the group. The consumer is increasingly becoming an actor in this new value chain”, explains Isabelle Piot-Lepetit. 
Interestingly, in a study on local food platforms, the French Observatory for Local Food Systems (ObSAT) recently found that, “of the hundred platforms in the study, those that were inclusive of farmers, providing information on their farming practices and giving them a voice, proved to be more resilient when consumer footfall dropped after lockdown was over”.

An instrument for local food systems 

Digital technologies are also useful in helping the various agrifood sectors to organise themselves within each agricultural area and to build links between areas, starting with on-farm practices, where the focus has moved beyond the confines of the individual field or parcel. A well-connected farming population is able to improve its coordination and keep its risks low. For example, the sowing dates for sunflowers can be synchronised, enabling farmers to mitigate the damage caused by corvids that eat the seed. 

A well-connected farming population is able to improve its coordination and keep its risks low.

In France, local food projects (PATs) have been introduced to make agriculture and food in the regions a more local affair altogether, providing support to new farmers, short supply chains and the use of local products in canteens. Brought in by the 2014 French Future of Farming Act, these PATs are co-created by groups of local actors (municipalities, agricultural or agrifood businesses, artisans, members of the public, etc.) always with digital support. 
“Since the EGalim 2 Act, localism has taken off. Indeed, for local authority canteens, 50% of products must now be sustainable¹and 20% must be organic. Continuity of supply is a major issue for local authorities and the quantities involved are enormous. In the Occitanie region, for example, a total of 40 million school meals must be supplied and managed each year. There are two possible ways to deal with this demand – either the system can use large mixed farms, or smaller fruit and vegetable production units can be combined, although for the second to work, you need a production and logistics plan and the whole network has to be managed. This is what Bonduelle does to supply its factories, placing farmers under contract. A #DigitAg thesis is currently looking at the planning and optimisation of fruit and vegetable crop rotations for today’s market at farm scale, and this could pave the way for upscaling”, explains Véronique Bellon-Maurel, Director of #DigitAg.
The greater Montpellier area (Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole intercommunal structure) has taken steps to encourage agroecology. Certified as a French market of national interest (MIN), the Mercadis platform connects professional buyers and producers. It encourages short supply chains and environmentally-friendly production and promotes the return to local agricultural and food products, with a focus on an “organic and local market floor”. More than this, it is working to reduce food insecurity and has made it easier for providers of food aid to access fresh local produce by enrolling the MIN in the Centrale de Règlement des Titres, the French food voucher scheme. The platform’s logistical data fIows are streamlined by digital technology. Similarly, as part of the “BoCal, Bon et Local” initiative, a local website, posts listings of short supply chains for consumers. These practical applications of the local authority’s agroecological and sustainable food policies are co-produced with societies, farmers, the scientific community and the consumers of Montpellier. 
To construct a project, participants need access to both information and know-how. How do you conduct a competitive analysis? What supply chains should be developed in an area? The answers are provided by the “Alimentation Locale” joint technology network (RMT), which promotes local food, and, through ObSAT, its Observatory for Local Food Systems. It supplies producers, municipalities and other facilitators with reliable figures on the economics of production, transformation and distribution logistics for short supply chains, helping them to put together local food projects and strengthen their business plans. Its database is open (data that are freely available for use by all), participative (in partnership with the French Chambers of Agriculture and the consumer group UFC Que Choisir), and aggregated (using different data sources).
_{1. Sustainable products: products that fairly reward the producer and are environmentally friendly.} 

Shared management and public policy

Digital technologies can also play a role in monitoring systems and strengthening the effectiveness of public-sector initiatives.
In response to repeated public health emergencies, the French government set up three platforms in 2018 to monitor the spread of infectious diseases (dealing respectively with animal health, plant health and the food chain), co-managed by INRAE, DGAL and the ANSES. Their purpose is to collect data to optimise the public health monitoring system. Collecting and sharing data from farmers and industry can speed up the detection of emerging diseases or the presence of pests, parasites or pollutants, quickly pinpointing their locations and enabling the direct management of an outbreak at its point of origin. Meanwhile, the Padi-web platform uses data collected on the internet to offer the same service for animal diseases (see MOOD project).
Water, soil and the air we breathe are common goods. The decline in their quality over the past decades has led in France to the introduction of public policies for their improvement or restoration. Digital’s vast and varied information-gathering powers and the opportunities it provides to share and exchange information and analysis have opened up a collective space in which the tools and information are now available to assess a given situation, define shared goals and establish joint strategies. Digital tools thus make shared management possible at local scale, building consensus and creating local action plans to conserve goods that benefit whole communities. They allow measures to be taken beyond the confines of fields and farms and a comprehensive strategic vision to be developed for a local area that improves the management of agricultural impacts. The conditions are thereby created for common goods to occupy a different social space. 
Remote sensing also has a place in the implementation of Europe-wide and national policies. In line with the European Green Deal, which has allowed the European Union to prioritise ecological and health issues, the next Common Agricultural Policy will link some of its funding to good farming practices and the reduction of environmental impacts. The rules for eco-schemes will thus make grants conditional on the presence of hedgerows or buffer strips on a minimum of 10% of a farmer’s land. There must, however, be a way to check whether farmers have indeed planted the hedgerows they declare in their submissions. The satellite offer from the DINAMIS consortium constitutes a first step towards such monitoring, giving greater force to the policies in place.

 By bringing producers and consumers closer together, digital allows greater transparency in the sector’s responses to society’s renewed interest in natural products and in environmentally-friendly practices. In making local systems easier to manage, it places greater emphasis on shared and public action. But to what end?