France

In the current French context, Action Against Hunger is committed to ensuring that everyone in France has the right to sufficient, healthy, sustainable and chosen food.

Today, more than 9 million French people live below the poverty line, and food is often the first adjustment variable in household budgets.

Food aid helps to partially cover the needs of 2 to 4 million people with varied profiles: single mothers, people living in peri-urban or rural areas, the elderly, the working poor…This aid, often deployed in the form of food distribution, only meets the emergency needs of precarious people and gives them little choice in what they consume.

This aid system cannot tackle the other structural barriers to access to food: food availability, physical accessibility, cultural dimensions, people’s mobility, specific health issues, type of housing…

Faced with increasing precariousness and inequalities, non-use and barriers to access to rights and food, Action Against Hunger has launched its intervention in France in 2019. Its guiding principle: to make its humanitarian expertise available to those involved in helping the most precarious people. Also, to act alongside them, by crossing expertise, to aim for operational and structural change.

In the Ile-de-France and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regions, Action Against Hunger has been working for over 3 years alongside those involved in access to food and the fight against precariousness and exclusion, to better cover the essential needs, including food, of those who are furthest from services.

Drawing on its fresh perspective on the challenges of precariousness in France, and nourished by its international experience, Action Against Hunger provides those involved in access to food with diagnostic and analytical tools, as well as various forms of action, in order to co-construct responses tailored to people’s needs.

To achieve this, Action Against Hunger works with its partners to document the barriers to access to food in the field. Action Against Hunger goes out to meet the people supported by the associations in order to get to know them better and understand their constraints in covering their basic needs and essential rights. Through field surveys, Action Against Hunger asks the people supported by the associations about their practices and food security, their health, their well-being, their access to information and their rights, etc. Through these surveys, Action Against Hunger supports its partners in developing their operational strategies and implementing recommendations, by sharing its expertise, in order to act on barriers to access to essential services and rights, including food.

In 2022, Action Against Hunger deployed 12 surveys and provided assistance or support on an ad hoc basis to the teams of 27 aid schemes in the Ile de France and Provence-Alpes-Côté d’Azur regions. At national level, for example, Action Against Hunger teams carried out a survey on the needs and expectations of Restos du cœur clients.

This is why Action Against Hunger works in partnership with other players in the field and in research, to co-construct pilot projects, test and document new aid methods that are better suited to meeting the needs of the most precarious populations, and feed into changes in public policy. The Passerelle project in Montreuil is a good example. So is the food voucher project under construction with the Seine St Denis departmental council, or the territorial project to combat non-recourse and promote access to sustainable food in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille.

In conjunction with its partners, Action Against Hunger participates in various forums for exchange and coordination at both local and national level. For example, Action Against Hunger played an active role in the work of COCOLUPA – Comité de coordination de la lutte contre la précarité alimentaire – set up in 2020 to develop policies to combat food insecurity.

Action Against Hunger facilitates the exchange of expertise, data and best practices between players involved in access to food, and raises awareness of the issues surrounding access to food. Action Against Hunger co-produces and/or shares multi-actor studies on the issues of precariousness, access to rights and access to food, such as the operational research project ISSimars (ItinéraireS et Situation de vie en squat) in Marseille, or the report les Oubliés du droit d’asile in Ile-de-France.

At national level, Action Against Hunger feeds into public policy by advocating access to sustainable food for all. It makes its proposals known to all the players concerned, through alliances with other players and directly. For example, Action Against Hunger is involved in discussions on the Nutrition, Food and Climate Strategy as part of the work of the Climate Action Network, and is also an active member of the Collectif Nourrir and the Collectif Alerte.