From my neighbourhood in Brussels to the European countryside, I invite you to discover a citizen movement in full development: the CSA or Community Supported Agriculture. Confronted with the urgency to reinvest and to reorient agriculture towards more respectful models of production and distribution, the CSA defends the short circuit and the establishment of direct links with producers.

Throughout the documentary, we will discover the GASAP in Beligum, the AMAP in France, the ZMAG in Croatia, the AIAB in Italy, URGENCY - the international network of all the networks…or a multitude of individuals like me mobilised by the potential of change they represent.

My documentary will take us to the backstage of a network of informed consumers and farmers with common sense. We will discover together that each one of us can make choices that allow farmers to live in dignity and gourmet consumers to smile in front of their plates every day.

Why?

An enormous gap has grown between consumers and the agricultural world over the last decades. At the same time, the quality of our diet has considerably decreased, with consequences on our health and our planet. On one side, modern consumers face the obsessing question of “what to choose”. On the other side, farmers are confronted with difficulties that affect their motivation and jeopardize their own survival: “Towards which solutions”.

In view of the above, the ideas promoted by the CSA open a new range of questions that I consider worth addressing in a documentary: Why is it important to promote the short circuit? Is it necessary to create networks? What is a fair price? What type of bio do we defend today?

But also: Are we currently setting new forms of solidarity and co-responsibility? Are these initiatives only temporary solutions to the crisis? Is this a fashionable phenomenon carried out by informed consumers? Will these initiatives dissolve in the big neo- liberal machine like some other preceding movements (protest movements that emerged after May 68?) Or are we witnessing a softer but deeper transformation of current social structures?

Consumers have also a role to play in this system.

We might be setting the ground for a new Europe, whose origins lay on a large part on agriculture issues.

Isn’t our world organized around our plates?

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How?

Over the last two years, with my video camera, I have been at the same time a witness and a stakeholder of these encounters that are currently mushrooming everywhere. Starting from the relationship between the producers and my own neighborhood buying group, I will invite you to discover the GASAP network through their links with their producers before focusing on other European networks.

In my travel diary, a farming community which is enriched by a common vision and displays a prodigious variety of know-how - a thousand miles away from the standardization of products that one tends to make us swallow.

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With my fellow travellers, in search for an alternative way of consuming and acting, we will meet consumers and farmers from different European regions. Through the CSA networks, we will share our reflections to imagine together alternative models to the one we currently live in.

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A passionate meeting of the international platform URGENCY, the lively demonstration of milk producers in Brussels or the Good Food March 2013 and its lively procession of activist eaters will constitute the backdrop of these intimate and collective words.

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Through splendid landscapes, the film will also display moving and hopeful human encounters and realities that say more than any long speeches.

We need another citizen boost for these images to finally take shape and for this virtuous circle to be nourished by an optimistic vision of our consumers’ world.

Autrement

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