On the 27th of September, the French Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, Marc Fesneau, met with professionals of the fruit and vegetable sector to validate with them the development process and the shared calendar for the medium and long-term sovereignty plan for the sector, announced by the French government on March 16th as part of the resilience plan.
© Xavier Remongin
The goal of the agricultural component of the economic and social resilience plan is to address the consequences of the war in Ukraine on the agricultural and agri-food sectors in France. In addition to the immediate measures of economic support for the most affected sectors, this plan includes operational strategies to overcome dependence in key sectors and strengthen the French and European food sovereignty.
Regarding the fruit and vegetable sector, this medium/long-term ambition will be based on the development of a plan of action to strengthen the sovereignty of the fruit and vegetable sector, at the French and European levels.
In order to achieve its goal in terms of food sovereignty, France has real assets to be more autonomous and to secure its production of all ranges of fruit and vegetables, thanks to its great diversity of soils and climates, on the continent and its overseas departments.
The plan aims to provide a strategic framework and operational action levers so that the fruit and vegetable sector can reverse the trend of production curves by 2030 and meet these challenges.
It is also an environmental challenge for the sector to increase its production in a context of climate change and to fully succeed its agri-environmental transition in order to achieve food sovereignty in the future by means of sustainable production methods.
In order to develop this plan and action levers, discussions will bring together the professionals and services concerned at the transversal level on the following major strategic axes:
(1) Crop protection,
(2) Competitiveness, investments and innovation,
(3) Research, experimentation, training and generation renewal,
(4) Boosting fruit and vegetable consumption in the food model
From October until the end of the year, work will be conducted in order to validate the plan and start implementing the first action by early 2023.
“This sovereignty plan for the fruit and vegetable sector meets the major challenge of strengthening food sovereignty in France and in Europe. The work launched today will make it possible to establish a strategic ambition for 2030 which will require taking resilience factors into account. The resilience of the agricultural world to climate change is indeed a central challenge to guarantee our food sovereignty,” explained Marc Fesneau. “I want to salute the mobilization of the professionals who are fully committed to the development of this action plan, its objectives and the construction, mobilization and deployment of the levers and means to achieve them.”