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Agroecology

Closer connections for stong local resilience

Digital has changed how we communicate, introducing new players, reconfiguring networks and transforming the shape of the economic landscape. In the agrifood sector in France, it has strengthened the role of the consumer and allowed new value chains to emerge that serve the community. Analysis.

Published on 07 April 2023

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

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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”
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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?

What sort of food future do we want?

A study1on future trends in food distribution, led by INRAE and Grenoble INP, has examined possible scenarios for the development of food markets in the next twenty years. The study looked at scenarios defined by four different ways for society to approach the market. In the first, “Individualism”, the consumer’s personal desires rule the market, giving the upper hand to the Big Five web giants (GAFAM). In the second, “Committed Engagement”, the management of common goods and the fair payment of farmers become a focus for consumers, whose views are expressed via on-line platforms. These issues also shape major public policies in this scenario. The third, “Communities”, leads to an archipelago of contrasting and incompatible food supply models. Last, a “Low Cost”, scenario leads to reductions in product quality and in returns for farmers following a price war between platforms. Bernard Ruffieux, who led the study, concludes: “E-commerce and local logistics are here to stay. But the way they shape the future has yet to be decided. Although the big platforms like Amazon and established operators are currently in the process of revising their economic models, consumers and public policy makers will also get a say in the matter”.
1. Foresight study “Quatre scénarios pour éclairer la distribution alimentaire du futur”, published in February 2022 and led by Bernard Ruffieux, Professor at the Grenoble and Louis-Georges Soler National Heritage Institute (INP) and Assistant Director of Science in Food and Bioeconomics at INRAE.

Keeping food and data safe: trust, traceability and transparency

From the monitoring of goods to their eventual recall, the traceability of food products is a matter of public health. Guarantees must be provided for the quality of the data used in the process, but data security is just as important. In France, information on food products’ provenance, expiry dates, ingredients and, for meat and dairy products, how much time animals have spent on pasture, is greatly appreciated by consumers. Only digital technology has the capacity to process, analyse and reproduce all these data. They are transmitted at all stages of production right through to the consumer and beyond, feeding into the databases of scoring systems such as Nutriscore or Eco-score, and of quality control systems such as the AOC and IGP certifications of origin, or labels like the French AB organic label. Digital can also track the consumer, analysing responses to the different types of product information. But how can we have confidence in the reliability of these systems, given their reliance on a vast pool of aggregated data trawled from an even vaster ocean of sources? Jérôme François, Director of the Num’Alim agrifood platform, explains the process: “Currently, the error rates for data supplied by the industry lie between 30 and 50%. Although most of the errors simply involve a missing decimal point or a mix-up between kilocalories and kilojoules, on occasion, more serious errors arise, for instance in cases where the information on allergens is incorrect. Here, by putting the users of their websites or apps at risk, businesses are playing with fire. That’s why our SCIC (public interest cooperative company), where agrifood businesses, consumer associations and public authorities work alongside each other, is supplying tools to our members so they can check their data with our partner Consotrust and can clean it up using machine learning, ironing out errors at an early stage.”
Because of the substantial contribution made by human error to the inaccuracies in food data, researchers need to develop data acquisition technologies with less human involvement. For example, as part of the interdisciplinary work at #DigitAg, the Convergence Institute for digital agriculture, an interdisciplinary postdoctoral researcher (INRAE-University of Montpellier) is exploring the possibility of linking sensors to RFID labels so that, in addition to tracking a product, they could also monitor the rate at which it deteriorates1. Data quality is a must, but the reliability and security of data transfers and flows is just as important, especially where food safety is concerned. For a number of years now, the Blockchain tool has been in the news. Originally created to ensure the safety of cryptocurrency transfers, it is well-suited to deal with the challenges of supply chains involving many actors in multiple sectors, both old and new, all with very different needs. A blockchain database is shared by all its users, with the data organised into blocks. For a block to be added to the chain, a complex validation algorithm is applied that calls for various forms of consensus from its users. Once validated, the block is added to the chain and can no longer be changed, preventing users from modifying data unilaterally. The drawback of blockchain as a security solution for information systems is its high energy consumption in systems that invite a large number of users.

1. The sensor is a biopolymer that reacts to the gases (CO2 and ethanol) given off by food as it deteriorates. It is attached to the internal surface of the packaging, just under the RFID label stuck on the outside. As the food product decomposes, the gases given off alter the electrolytes in the biopolymer, and the RFID reacts. This research is being conducted in the Electronics and Systems Institute (MRU 5214) and in the Agropolymer Engineering and Emerging Technologies laboratory (INRAE-University of Montpellier).