What if everyone in a city could eat healthy and ecological products?
This is the extraordinary challenge that the city of Albi has set itself!
It wants to provide each of its inhabitants with organic food!
To want is to be able and it is, it seems, the motto of the elected officials of this city of the Tarn who launched this audacious and courageous bet.
Their objective ? Food self-sufficiency in the city by 2020 .
Eventually, the 51,000 inhabitants of this city will be able to feed themselves from local and organic agriculture.
No fruit, no vegetable should grow more than 60 km from the consumer's table.
It is therefore the whole agricultural organization that must be rethought. Explanations:
By favoring short production and marketing circuits, three objectives are in the city's sights.
- Less carbon pollution due to limited freight transport.
- Better quality agricultural products.
- Guaranteed food security in the event of a food crisis.
The life of Albi has great ambitions for its population and gives itself the concrete means to achieve them.
Because it is only through political will and pragmatic and courageous decisions that this objective can be achieved.
73 hectares of fallow land have already been bought by the municipality by way of pre-emption. Only land near the city center!
As these acquisitions progress, market gardeners in need of cultivable plots will be able to invest these lands to develop their know-how.
In return, they will have to pay a modest rent of €70 per year and per hectare.
On the condition, however, that their production is organic and that it supplies the local market!
Results of this 1st year:8 hectares sold and 7 jobs created.
In parallel with this strategy of acquiring agricultural land, the city of Albi has decided to support the Incroyables Comestibles movement.
It is a sustainable and civic approach that promotes the cultivation of organic fruits and vegetables, everywhere, by everyone and for everyone.
The principle is that everyone has the opportunity to grow vegetables and everyone can pick them to eat.
And to encourage this approach, the flowerbeds of the city of Albi will give way to leeks, salads and other vegetables...
The green spaces of the town are available to residents who wish to plant their vegetable garden there.
And we bet that the vegetable beds will be as beautiful as the flower beds.
Yet habits die hard! It is still difficult for the inhabitants to bend down to pick the vegetables that grow in these public vegetable gardens for free.
“They have the impression that it is theft”, we explain in Le Figaro. Even if this small agricultural revolution is underway, everyone must be given time to adopt new habits.
But to close the loop of food self-sufficiency, there is still one actor to be convinced:mass distribution.
She too will have to play the game and get supplies from local players.
All hopes are allowed:consumer-citizen customers are turning away from imported products to favor local products. The supermarkets just have to follow this trend.
Eating good food, respectful of the environment, grown next to you, that is self-sufficiency.
A dream that can become a reality for everyone if citizens and politicians give themselves the means to achieve it. Just like in Albi!
