Europe Trials 'Food Social Security': Rising Prices, Cost of Living, Falling Access to Healthy Food [View all]

- Europe's unique trials in food 'social security,' BBC News, March 21, 2023. Ed. 🍏 🧀 🍓 - As food prices rise around the world and access to healthy nutrition falls, trials in France and Belgium are experimenting with a unique "social security" for food. -

On a crisp winter morning in Schaerbeek, a vibrant neighbourhood in north-east Brussels, Marie-Christine Hache walks the aisles of BEES Coop supermarket filling her cart with organic fruit, vegetables, nuts, rice, pulses and pasta. For Hache, the burden of grocery shopping amidst record-high prices has been eased through her participation in one of two novel initiatives trialling "social security for food".

The affordability of food is a growing concern for increasing numbers of households worldwide as people struggle to cope with the greatest cost of living crisis in a generation. With some forced to cut back on food to meet other essential expenses, food insecurity is on the rise around the world. The idea of social security for food might sound far-fetched.

But through recently launched projects in Montpellier in France and Brussels in Belgium, burgeoning collectives of NGOs, farmers, researchers and citizens are experimenting with the idea that quality, nutritious and organic food should be accessible to everyone – regardless of income. "Eating healthy and having access to quality food is expensive and only a minority of the population can afford to do so," says Margherita Via, project manager at BEES Coop.

Inspired by universal healthcare systems such as those in France & Belgium, civil society groups have proposed establishing a new branch of social security, under which each citizen would receive a monthly allowance enabling them to buy food meeting certain environmental & ethical criteria.. As the costs of the modern, globalised industrial food system – biodiversity loss, labour exploitation, food waste, disease – have come into sharper focus in recent years, calls to transform it have intensified...https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230321-cost-of-living-europes-trials-in-social-security