VIDEO. Paying for your groceries with your Vitale card is what the city of Bordeaux is testing

This is a first in France. Since last September, the city of Bordeaux has been testing Social Food Security (SSA). 150 students are affected. The SSA was launched at the initiative of Crepaq, a Gironde citizen organization, with the help of Gemme, the issuers of the local currency. “The idea of ​​Social Food Security emerged a few years ago from a national collective. It is based on 3 pillars: universality, so it concerns everyone and not just people in precarious situations, like Social Health Security today. Other pillars: the agreement and the contribution, so the goal is that everyone contributes according to their income and the benefits are distributed equally among everyone” explains Charlotte Boulay, project manager at Crepaq.

“We have 36% of students who say they skip meals for financial reasons”

Eva is one of the students who were drawn to test the device. “Basically, it’s like a mutual fund. I pay €20 every month and in exchange I have €100 worth of Gemme, so it’s a personal gain of €80 for shopping. The Gem, therefore, is the local currency in Gironde. La Gemme’s partner stores are stores that are organic, which will be more responsible, they will be small neighborhood grocers. I didn’t go to that kind of store at all because I couldn’t afford it. I would rather see the first prices without worrying about the origin. (…) Before, it was financially impossible to consume more responsibly” says Eva. Among the objectives of Social Food Security, there is “guarantee the right to food for everyone, promote local commerce and peasant agriculture in our territories. The question of fair remuneration for farmers is at the center of the SSA project” comments François Rocca, development manager for La Gemme.

Who can benefit ? “In terms of selection criteria, this was defined at the local fund meeting. So the only criteria that were retained were parity criteria, having as many boys as girls, as many non-gendered people. There are no income and budget criteria strictly speaking, since the principle of the SSA is to have a universal audience. So it doesn’t just concern people in precarious situations. In a global food social security project, if it were a law adopted on a national scale, income would be taken into account since everyone would contribute up to their income, but on the other hand, the amount received by the whole of the inhabitants would be the same” specifies Charlotte Boulay. “This program, around March last year, in 2023, there was a call on their Instagram account to fill out a questionnaire and I was to participate in the program and I really thank them” adds Eva, student.

“What we would like is to show that the SSA is a concrete response to respecting the right to food”

“Thanks to a local currency, even when you buy in a grocery store, the grocery store itself, when it receives this currency from the Gem, it will be influenced to be able to rethink its network of suppliers a little, to integrate more and more more local producers. The goal is that this payment document will not leave its territory. So we circulate across the Gironde and therefore it will not leave the Gironde and it will only circulate between professionals who are service providers. They respond to a common charter, therefore an environmental, social and ethical charter. We see that thanks to the local currency, there are several grocery stores, several organic stores which, in fact, change suppliers, which go, for example, directly from farms which are 20 kilometers from the metropolis, therefore towards Léognan, Le Haillan, Saint-Médard, rather than going through purchasing cooperatives” indicates François Rocca. “The idea is to continue to keep this local food fund alive, to try in 2024-2025 to co-construct a project on a larger scale. Because food is a question of health” concludes Charlotte Boulay.