Teaching

Sustainable food systems (Master)

The aim of the course is to make students aware of the levers for action that exist within territories to achieve the transformation of food systems towards resilience and sustainability, as set out in the objectives of the United Nations Sustainable Development Programme.
Feeding humanity by reducing human pressure on natural resources through a change in diets that become healthy and sustainable and encourage agroecological practices and ecosystem services. This project is one of the ways in which the United Nations' goal 12 for sustainable development can be achieved. This goal is based on responsible consumption and production. Food and agricultural issues have been brought to the fore by the current health crisis, as well as by the commitments made to curb climate change and the effects of the globalisation of trade on food sovereignty. It is against this backdrop that the sustainability of food systems has been made the subject of a United Nations summit in 2021.
In Switzerland, the subject is also highly topical. Since the amendment of Article 104 in 1996 and the introduction of the sustainability objective in the Federal Constitution in 1999, the sustainability of agricultural practices has been one of the objectives of agricultural policy, but there has been fierce criticism of the results achieved over the last 20 years. This is reflected in the debates surrounding the integration of food security and food sovereignty. In the votes on these two issues, 78.7% of the electorate voted in favour of the federal decree on food safety (2017), although the "For food sovereignty" initiative failed to win the vote, with only 31.6% in favour (2018) (FSO/voting statistics). In 2021, the people rejected the two initiatives "For a pesticide-free Switzerland" and "For clean drinking water and healthy food". However, in Switzerland too, as elsewhere in the world, the globalisation of trade and the technologies available are having a profound impact on food systems, pushing them to their environmental and social limits. The loss of biodiversity, the depletion of arable land, water pollution, air pollution from greenhouse gas emissions, malnutrition and food insecurity, the accentuation of inequalities, food injustice, the desertification of rural areas and the galloping urban concentration are worrying civil society and ordinary citizens alike.
Beyond the debates, individual commitment is gaining in importance: new consumption and production practices are calling into question in depth the commercial circuits, legal status, policies and multiple social relationships that are forged between actors and their food.
The aim of this course is to explore the contemporary dynamics between agriculture and food on the scale of living areas, defined as the smallest territory in which inhabitants have access to the most common facilities and services[1], and more specifically in Switzerland.
Target audience
Masters students interested in the themes of agriculture and food, 'eating locally', responsible consumption and how citizens as consumers can influence the sustainability of agricultural production.
[1] INSEE (1998). Les campagnes et leurs villes, Contours et caractères, INSEE-INRA, Paris.
Le bassin de vie, un territoire porteur de ruralité aux marges de l'Île-de-France The "Life basin": A Territory Putting down Rurality in Periurban Fringes of Paris Claire Aragau p. 7-20 https://doi.org/10.4000/norois.4807 and https://journals.openedition.org/norois/4807