Presentation
Food systems in Europe and the UK are not delivering for people or the planet. This assessment is based on well-documented poor health outcomes, environmental harm and the persistent difficulty of making healthy and sustainable diets affordable and accessible–particularly for those most affected. Against this backdrop, this report examines the activities of changemakers in France, the barriers they face and the needs they express to overcome these barriers and to seize opportunities that are available to them. The objective is to better align research and funding with action and to accelerate food system transformation, with a focus on health, climate and equity outcomes. The analysis is part of a larger project carried out with the support of the Wellcome Trust, in order to better understand how to improve health, climate and equity outcomes of food systems across the EU (covering France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain) and the UK.
Key Messages
- Changemakers in France attach paramount importance to intervening in public policy. Faced with mounting obstacles, however, they are increasingly turning to economic actors, with a view to transformation through the market, and, more marginally still, to action at local level.
- There are four main barriers, direct and indirect, to changing food practices:
• political instability and a lack of political ambition;
• the economic constraints bearing on households and businesses;
• narratives that work against change;
• and consumers expressing preferences that are incompatible with a healthy, sustainable food system.
- To overcome these barriers, changemakers point first and foremost to needs outside the academic sphere. Where research needs are mentioned, they refer to synthesis work in accessible, plain-language form.
• Needs outside research: multi-stakeholder dialogue spaces; new narratives; building on experiments already carried out; support for developing new supply chains.
• Research needs concern three areas above all: the social and economic implications of food system transformation; the social and political conditions for change; and the technical and economic knowledge required to navigate a transition.
