General Alert

In the 1970s, most of the French citizens were gardening. While cultivating the garden of one’s house or an allotment garden, everyone had a link with nature, its direct environment and was cooking its local production. The development of urbanism linked to the one of the tertiary sector has lead to rural exodus. It generated the concentration of buildings in the outskirts of cities and thecreation of megacities. The price of real estate has quickly forced the new city-dwellers to live in smaller apartments and accommodations, without any outdoor area, without direct link with nature. Growing fruit and vegetables has turned into an activity for the elderly people and the ones negligently called “country people”. In accelerated life models, going grocery shopping has turned into a weekly sprint after very busy weeks spent between office hours, family responsibilities and packed transport, but until now there was something for everyone, as one could chose Japanese, Thai or Mexican meals while at the supermarket. 

Photo: Zoom conference regarding the project Existence-B, May 2020 (see article: "How can we survive? What actions can we undertake? Part V")

The former French international football player Vikash Dhorasoo reminded us last year during a zoom conference that “when we were children, we were used to eat the same food, according to seasons and to where we lived”.

In 2021, we all buy our groceries in stores, mainly in medium and large-scaled supermarkets. Let’s imagine that tomorrow, when entering your usual supermarket for the weekly family grocery shopping, you discover that the whole food shelves are empty. These last days, due to a lack of supplies, shelves and stalls were looted! You then head to another store where you live the same experience. Horrified, you place a call to friends who describe the same scary scene. An unimaginable horror movie takes place in France, continuously reported by the TV channels: queues, riots, law enforcement agencies overwhelmed…

Why would we alert you with this vision of horror? First of all, the Agence Nationale Sécurité des Systèmes informatiques (National Security for Information Systems Agency) alerts on the frequency of cyberattacks. A massive cyberattack towards mass distribution is far from being impossible. Another reason is that a new variant of the covid-19 could neutralize truck drivers, as one could have feared at the beginning of the crisis in 2020.

How could the nightmare of a hungry France have been concealed?

However, some people work hard for the lack of food never to happen. Have their alert been taken seriously, have they been heard? Stéphane Linou, pionnier of the Locavore movement, has been working on this subject for more than twenty years. He has travelled all over the French territories and has reported that none of us could be fed locally: non-existent diversity of the cultures, dependency to foreign supplies, collapse of the bio-diversity, climate or terrorist disasters, extreme dependence towards fossile energies, vulnerability of large-scaled supermarkets and fret platforms because of cyber-attacks. The Castelnaudary city councillor believes that food resilience is a question of national security because populations will not be able to feed themselves in case of force majeure due to the fact that stores only have a three-day stock average.

His work has recently produced a resolution project presented in December 2020 by the Haute-Garonne Senatrice Mrs. Françoise Laborde entitled “Food Resilience and Security of the Territories”, however the proposition, in accordance with article 34-1 of the Constitution regarding food resilience of the territories, has been refused.

According to Alexandre Boisson, an expert in systemic risks, since the warnings of the Senators Laborde and Marchand, respectively in 2019 and 2020, nothing important would have been urgently undertaken towards the vulnerability identified by Stéphane Linou : "At the State level, improvements are being made but in my view, they are too shya gainst the threats". For the expert, "During this sanitary crisis, cyber-attacks take place on a daily basis while the creation of a local food production will take time (fertility of the soils, change of the consumption habits of the populations etc...). If the population is not aware of the major risks, the resilience will not happen without difficulties. The Conseil National pour la Résilience Alimentaire (CNRA) was Stéphane Linou’s wish, as of 2020 he was already discussing the subject (to be watched here)". "Indeed, Territory Food Projects - Projets Alimentaires Territoriaux (PAT) – exist and the State tries to implement them. Their objective is to relocate agriculture and food in the territories while supporting the setting up of farmers, short supply chains or local products in cafeterias. However, without citizens aware to accept the problem, we will be confronted to a failure to breach a duty of care or of security as per the law or the regulation (article 121-3 of the criminal code) of people in charge of public peace. As a reminder at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, Mrs.Christiane Lambert, President of the