A letter from Let’s Food to you

Dear YPARD community,

I would like to present you the Let’s Food Cities project, launched in September 2017 by the French NGO Let’s Food. 

To tell you a bit more about why we initiated this project, let us tell you more about our background and how this idea appeared to be the right thing to us.

Anna Faucher, now president of Let’s Food, is a graduate of both political sciences and sustainable food systems. She worked for three years for the French NGO IUFN, providing support to French cities in building their own food projects, fostering local food supply, ensuring sustainable production and fair food distribution within the city. 

For these 3 years, she witnessed the growth of many local food initiatives and young professionals acting for more sustainable food and agriculture in cities. She felt the urge to share these experiences, initiatives, to adapt it to other cities’ contexts, in France and in the world.

In 2017, she decides to associate with Louison Lançon, now treasurer of Let’s Food, to this idea, to start building and putting it into action. Louison is an agronomist, specialized in sustainable food systems. She worked for three years at the FAO in the Food for the cities programme, providing support to local authorities in Africa, Asia and Latin America in better understanding and planning more sustainable and resilient city region food systems. 

With our different and complementary needed skills and experiences, we created the Let’s Food NGO and Let’s Food Cities project.

Let’s Food Cities project aims at encouraging cities to transition towards sustainable food systems by fostering cooperation and exchanges of good practices. To do so, we are using the strong tool of decentralized cooperation mechanisms in France, to specifically foster and operationalize cooperation on food between French cities and their existing twin cities.

The seven French signatory cities of the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (as per September 2017), are involved in the process, as well as seven of their twin cities in Africa, Asia, Middle-East and Latin America, coming to a total of seven couples of cities. 
As at today, the list is: Lyon/Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Grenoble/Sfax (Tunisia), Montpellier/Chengdu (China), Marseille/Valparaiso (Chile), Bordeaux/Guanajuato (Mexico), Nantes/Durban (South Africa), Paris/Tehran (Iran).

First, a food system analysis and collection of good practices (coming from the public, private sector as well as the civil society) in the 14 cities are conducted, to better understand the strengths and challenges in each city. This work already involves more than sixty students in France, with different backgrounds to be able to tackle the diverse components of food in cities. 

A cross-analysis among all cities, and specifically within each of the seven couples of cities, will then allow to identify concrete areas of cooperation between the cities involved. A series of short videos illustrating the food system of the seven twin cities will also be produced and shared. 

Let’s Food Cities project is supported by the French Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the World Food Systems UNESCO Chair, the Léa Nature Foundation, as well as Grenoble, Montpellier and Bordeaux, first cities on board. The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact is also a key partner of the project.

We are now looking for any contact, resources, local initiatives you may be aware of in Ho Chi Minh City, Sfax, Chengdu, Valparaiso, Guanajuato, Durban or Tehran (or even their respective countries), related to: food production, agro-processing, distribution, marketing, food waste management, food security. 

YPARD members would surely be of great help for us! Your feedback, thoughts or ideas are more than welcome! Looking forward to hearing from you.

More info available on our website, and on our brochure (French / English / Spanish)

Warm regards,
Let’s Food

Photo credit: Let's Food