Taking a step back from local production

The last few years have witnessed the rise of a local food craze widely platformed by the media. This trend, driven by economic actors, non-profit organizations, consumers and public authorities, seeks to reconnect eaters and farmers. It has translated into the re-territorialization of food systems, that is, the affirmation of the territorial anchoring of food growing and processing activities; the relocalization of food systems, in other words, the reduction of the geographical distance between places of production and consumption; and the development of short supply chains – forms of commercialization with few or no intermediaries (Wallet et al., 2017; Chiffoleau, 2019).

As new ways of building proximity proliferate, localness in particular is emerging as a new attribute that seems to have it all. But we should beware of the ‘local trap’, which tends to posit this scale of activity as inherently virtuous.

Demand for proximity

A trend towards the institutionalization and massification of local consumption, similar to that observed with organic products, indeed appears to be underway, with the establishment of farmers on urban land by local authorities, the promotion of urban agriculture, the development of ‘vertical farms’ in cities, the publication of catalogues of local product suppliers, the opening of farm shops or farm drive-throughs, the development of local supply in collective catering and the development of local offerings in mass retail.

This movement has a long history and is growing around the world. In Japan, direct farm food purchasing groups, teikei (提携), developed in the late 1960s. They emerged under the impetus of young urban women who were eager to source organic products (milk in particular) for their children, against the backdrop of numerous food poisoning incidents linked to the excessive use of chemical inputs (Amemiya, 2011).

In the United States and Canada, the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, which emerged in the 1980s and was inspired by a model developed in Switzerland, allows consumers to reserve a portion of a farm’s future harvest in advance. These local solidarity partnerships, which are still limited in scope, generally share a commitment to preserving small farms using environmentally friendly farming methods (Pouzenc, 2020).

In Italy, from the 1980s, the Slow Food movement was quick to promote the beneficial effects of eating local, quality food. In Brazil, in 1993, the city of Belo Horizonte (2.4 million inhabitants at the time) launched a public food security policy based on the promotion of food grown by small peri-urban family farmers through subsidized prices at popular restaurants, farmers’ markets in the city, food banks and a law requiring 30 per cent local purchases in public tenders for school catering (Rocha, 2001).

On the African continent, local production has been promoted in response to changes in eating habits (Touré, 1982), the increase in food imports and the economic dependence they generate. For example, in the Sahel, the Regional Programme for the Promotion of Local Cereals (Procelos, Programme régional de promotion des céréales locales) was implemented across the region from 1987 for nearly ten years to encourage the resurgence of African millet, sorghum, maize, rice and fonio in domestic markets (CTA, 1989). Furthermore, following the food price crises on international markets in 2008 and 2011, a French network of NGOs, the CFSI (Comité français pour la solidarité internationale), launched ‘the battles for local consumption in West Africa’ (Eloy et al., 2019). Localness here refers to the national or even regional space – in contrast with international markets – rather than to a more restricted territorial area.

In France, the early 2000s witnessed the development of a network of non-profit organizations for the maintenance of peasant farming, AMAP (Associations pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne). This network is partly inspired by the North American CSA model: consumers subscribe to receive food baskets supplied by local farmers. In addition, beyond the long-standing practices of direct sales by farmers at markets or on farms, a wide range of initiatives has emerged to encourage the sourcing of local products by households and catering establishments (Dedinger et al., 2021). These initiatives, which often started out as a way to challenge conventional farming and its commercialization through mass retail, are now supported by public authorities and are also being imitated by the private sector, which sees opportunities in this new market segment. Supermarkets are thus promoting local farmers on their shelves – this is particularly the case within independent chains where each owner is free to choose the products they supply. Urban agriculture is also attracting interest from many companies. The Lufa urban farms in Montreal, for example, are inspiring cities and supermarkets that are starting to set up farms on their roofs (Pouyat, 2018).

The ‘local’ promise

There is no official definition of what constitutes a local product. The ‘reasonable’ geographical distance between the place of production and the place of consumption varies depending on the location and the products concerned. In France, for example, this distance ranges from a few kilometres to less than 150 km for ‘proximity supply chains’, as defined by the French Agency for Ecological Transition (Ademe, 2017). In Africa, the concept of ‘local’ extends to national production or even to neighbouring countries. In industrialized countries, relocalization initiatives are most often presented as alternatives to the conventional model based on their forms of production, processing and organization and/or on their desire for transformation, which some authors describe as a ‘promise of difference’ (Le Velly, 2017). The promoters of these initiatives generally consider that they contribute to

• restoring economic and social ties of trust between consumers and farmers, offering the latter remuneration deemed more equitable by charging a ‘fair price’ (Chiffoleau, 2019);

• giving new meaning to both farming activity and the act of consumption, thus restoring the value of food;

• promoting the product attributes of freshness and seasonality;

• reducing packaging;

• minimizing losses and waste along the supply chain by reducing the number of intermediaries and valourizing products that do not meet the criteria set for long supply chains;

• maintaining agricultural and processing activities, thus contributing to local economic development and employment;

• raising consumers’ awareness of how their food is produced;

• restoring the balance of power between the actors in the food chain to the benefit of farmers and consumers;

• reducing environmental impacts in terms of energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Analyses generally posit localism as a response to the social, economic and environmental failures of a ‘dominant’, ‘conventional’, ‘intensive’, ‘agro-industrial’ or ‘productivist’ food system (Renting et al., 2003; Deverre and Lamine, 2010). This food system, also considered ‘global’, produces food that is removed from the places and conditions of its production. It is deterritorialized food, that is, ‘food from nowhere’, as opposed to food anchored in its social and cultural context – ‘food from somewhere’ (Fonte and Papadopoulos, 2010). The global scale has been that of the petro-chemicalization of farming, the commodification of seeds, the globalization of transport, the development of large distribution channels and the financialization of agricultural markets. The rise of local food thus appears as a counterpart to the critique of global food, a locus of resistance to a global approach deemed anomic (DuPuis and Goodman, 2005; Paddeu, 2017).

The relocalization of food can also be seen as a response to the various forms of distancing (geographical, economic, political, cognitive and sensory) between eaters and their food (Chapter 6). This distancing was already noted by Walter P. Hedden (head of the Port of New York trade office) in his book How Great Cities Are Fed, published in 1929. In this book, he showed how New York City, which depended on distant food supplies (lettuce from California, lemons from Italy, butter from Denmark etc.) and was losing its surrounding farmland to urban sprawl, would be threatened by any interruption to this supply (Cohen, 2010; McCabe, 2010). Hedden was the first to use the concept of a ‘foodshed’ (drawing an analogy with watersheds) to denote the whole geographical area from which food reaches a group of eaters. It includes the farmland, processing and distribution facilities, transport systems, wholesalers and retailers involved. He noted that fruit and vegetables travelled an average of nearly 2,500 km from farm to New Yorkers’ tables. He thus explained that ‘the widening gap in physical distance between the point of production and the point of consumption has its counterpart in the attenuation of the contact and mutual understanding between producers and consumers’ (Hedden, 1929). This was almost a hundred years ago.

The term ‘foodshed’ was revisited much later by permaculturist Arthur Getz (1991) to ask the question: ‘Where does our food come from and how does it reach us?’ Beyond the metaphor, this concept reveals that consumers are often so far removed from the source of their food that they cannot grasp the consequences of their purchasing habits (Kloppenburg et al., 1996). Recognizing their food catchment area can give a person a sense of anchorage in biological and social realities but also a sense of responsibility towards that territory.

The COVID-19 crisis, with the border closures and restrictions on movement it caused, was an opportunity for many countries to reflect on their degree of food dependence on other nations. In France, food sovereignty [1] – which the peasant organization La Via Campesina had long called for in response to the liberalization of international markets in the 1990s – emerged as a theme of public debate. Fears of shortages even led some actors to promote forms of food autonomy [2] (Rouillay and Becker, 2020).

Beware of the local trap

Some of the arguments in support of relocalization must however be put into perspective. First, it is important to remember that, historically, cities have not always developed in the heart of foodsheds with the capacity to feed them – far from it. Some cities were built by the sea or on rivers and, as Braudel (1993) has shown, they relied heavily on distant trade, which multiplied as inexpensive means of transport developed from the time of the Industrial Revolution (Chapter 5). Moreover, local production is not possible everywhere. Even if all industrial wastelands and urban interstices were converted into farmland and building roofs were used to grow food, urban agriculture could only make a marginal contribution to cities’ food supplies. For example, by increasing Paris’s agricultural surface area tenfold to 33 hectares, the city could hope to produce 500 tonnes of food per year or 0.26 per cent of what it consumes (Leray, 2018).

Relocalizing agricultural production as close as possible to consumption areas would require a complete reconfiguration of agricultural production, as well as giving up regional specialities to some extent. Yet many countries have policies in place to promote and protect the typicity of products and the associated know-how in the face of food standardization. Thus, a compromise is needed between two seemingly contradictory trends: diversifying to reduce the negative effects of specialization and specializing to capitalize on the characteristics of a territory.

Relocalization is often seen as environmentally beneficial because it reduces the distances travelled. For this reason, the display on food products of the food miles calculation method, proposed by Tim Lang and formalized by Angela Paxton (1994), was initially promoted by some as a way to help consumers reduce their carbon footprint. Since then, life cycle assessment calculations regarding food systems have revealed the ultimately limited share of emissions associated with transport. In France, for example, transport accounts for less than 14 per cent of the food system’s GHG emissions, whereas agricultural production accounts for about two-thirds (Barbier et al., 2019). Reducing supply distances therefore has little impact on a food system’s carbon footprint. Thus, food that is produced locally but out of season in a heated greenhouse may consume more energy and emit more GHGs than an imported product grown outdoors, even when transport is included. Moreover, logistics is crucial: large volumes transported efficiently over long distances can emit less GHGs per tonne than small volumes transported over short distances in under-filled or returning-empty vans (Ademe, 2017). Food’s environmental impact is also strongly linked to the distances travelled by consumers: increasing the number of trips made to purchase supplies from different farmers who are not necessarily grouped together can prove very costly from an environmental point of view.

Moreover, direct sales by local farmers can place the burden of the cost and know-how associated with distribution work (order fulfilment etc.) on them, when they are not necessarily equipped for this additional (and mental) workload. A study on the functioning of the AMAP in the Rhône-Alpes region (France) also highlighted the fear expressed by some farmers of feeling dependent on consumers (Mundler, 2007). This fear points to the relationship of domination that could develop between consumers who generally have a high level of social and cultural capital and a farmer, should their income come to depend on the strength of these same consumers’ commitment. In practice, the solidarity that develops may thus be top–down, from consumers to the producer. However, we should note that farmers generally combine several distribution channels, which affords them a certain amount of leeway (Maréchal, 2008).

Like all other scales, the local scale is not an independent entity with inherent qualities. The scale itself is not a given; it is a social construct, dependent on the actors involved and the agenda they have set for themselves. It is the content of that agenda that will produce sustainability or social justice objectives, not the scale at which that agenda is implemented (Born and Purcell, 2006). Thus, a relocalized food system is just as likely to be more or less sustainable or more or less fair as a food system at another scale (Stein and Santini, 2021). Local food is not inherently ‘good’. Geographical proximity does not guarantee the non-use of large quantities of pesticides (especially on peri-urban land, where the price of land encourages more intensive farming) or the non-use of exploited foreign labour. Nor does it guarantee a better food supply in terms of health, taste or nutrition.

Finally, while relocalization undeniably creates opportunities for the inclusion and participation of new actors, the local scale remains dependent on the dominant political economy and existing social privilege can therefore be reproduced at this scale by serving the interests of a small ‘local elite’ withdrawn into its ‘protected’ food territory (Allen, 2010; DuPuis and Goodman, 2015).

Localness also has a dark side, with an identity focus characterized by withdrawal and the rejection of otherness, pandering to a sense of specificity and authenticity. A fairly widespread discourse, echoed by far-right parties, promotes a defensive version of ‘localism’ (Hinrichs, 2003; Winter, 2003; Charbonnier, 2018) that is traditionalist and narrow. It also risks fomenting competition between territories that succeed in managing local food systems (owing to social, economic, geographical or political attributes) and those that do not (Allen and Guthman, 2006; Feagan, 2007). The activation of localness may also contradict the goal of territorial integration in countries seeking above all to appease risks of internal conflicts and to build national unity.

Ultimately, where the local scale proves particularly interesting is undoubtedly in the mobilization of stakeholders – farmers, citizens, consumers, politicians – and the development of new forms of governance to regain sovereignty over food systems. The growing number of territorial food projects, particularly in France, is evidence of this. These projects generally emphasize the principles and values associated with sustainability and equity. Even as they work towards these goals, they need to make trade-offs between benefits to farmers and accessibility for low-income consumers, and to strike the right policy balance between reform at the local level and the pursuit of systemic change on broader scales (Feenstra and Campbell, 2014). In short, it is important to ensure that local initiatives do not distract from the macroeconomic policies and structures that organize our agriculture and food, such as the EU Common Agricultural Policy. The challenge is to ensure that these local governance frameworks are gradually able to federate into networks and form real political forces that can have an impact on national or international food system governance bodies (Chapter 22).

For a cosmopolitan localism

We eat our way through the world from breakfast-time, drinking our tea, coffee or cocoa, possibly with sugar (Grataloup, 2017). By its very nature, food connects us to other territories (Chapters 2 and 5). For example, according to a study by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, two-thirds of the food we eat historically originated from other parts of the world, irrespective of where we find ourselves (Khoury et al., 2016). It seems that the whole world is indeed nestled on our plates – the outcome of a long history of the spread of food production, human migrations, conquests, great discoveries and trade.

Bruno Latour (2021) proposes the concept of ‘subsistence territories’: ‘Tell me what you live off and I’ll tell you how far your living space extends.’ This concept seeks to shift from a cartographic and administrative definition of territory (seen from above), with a clear demarcation between inside and outside, to a more horizontal understanding of dependencies and interactions with other territories, however distant. It captures the difference between the territory within which we are situated (‘the world in which we are’) and the distant territories on which we depend or even from which we profit (‘the world in which we live’): when it comes to food, some territories are subject to the domination of others. Historically, this is clearly exemplified by the spice trade or the slave plantation system. But even today, we still, for example, consume bananas grown on land ‘elsewhere’ in the French Caribbean, which has been knowingly polluted with a pesticide that is banned in mainland France, chlordecone (Ferdinand, 2022).

If we recognize that we are linked across food territories, let us commit to a ‘cosmopolitan localism’ that ‘cherishes a particular place, yet at the same time knows about the relativity of all places’ (Sachs, 1992): a localism embedded in a global dynamic where communities are not isolated from one another but interconnected in a world of circulations (Manzini, 2007). With regard to food, fair trade and products with a quality and origin label (protected geographical indications, registered designations of origin etc.) perfectly illustrate this solidarity between territories and the possibility of translocalism (Ho, 2020), transporting a product with a territorial origin from one place to another. Even if they come from regions far from where consumers live, terroir products, which are ‘localized’ (their origin or even their conditions of production are known), allow for this cognitive connection (Bazzani and Canavari, 2017). Similarly, some cities support agriculture that guarantees access to quality products in the territories that supply them by establishing solidarity contracts, as the city of Hanoi in Vietnam does with the provinces that supply it or as exemplified by the collective in Rennes that runs the ‘Terres de source’ project (Zeggoud, 2021).

Conclusion

Herein lies the value of processes of hybridization between local and more distant supplies, allowing for territorial anchoring without being locked into a local space. These processes are defined by some as ‘food systems of the middle’: they have intermediate configurations in terms of size, and they are hybrid in terms of their actors, their organization and the values they hold (Chazoule et al., 2015). Local food is thus valued beyond the confines of a specific space. After all, we are always consuming someone else’s local food.