Food Smart Cities in Belgium: Enabling fair, healthy and sustainable Food for all

Urban food environments and food supply chains in Belgium are more inclusive, resilient, and enabling fair, healthy, sustainable & nutritious diets (HSN) for all citizens, especially women, youth and vulnerable groups Cities are key entry points for speeding up the transition to sustainable food systems. Focusing on key supply chains and the wider urban food environment, Rikolto in Belgium will catalyse collective action amongst local actors, pursuing diverse interventions: 1. Inclusive food markets that cater to smallholder producers and vulnerable urban consumers. To help develop such markets, we will promote inclusive business relations in food chains and facilitate sustainable food entrepreneurship. To achieve the greatest possible impact and reach as many people as possible, we focus on schools and retailers. - For schools, we work together with the cities of Leuven, Antwerpen and Ghent on models to offer fair, healthy and sustainable food for everyone in all schools, including vulnerable young people. Through exchange and joint learning and in synergy with other organizations, we want to reach all schools in Flanders, both in terms of the supply of healthy and sustainable food and in the learning process. - With retailers, we will work on making a number of basic food products more sustainable, while also setting up a positive competition among retailers to perform as strongly as possible in promoting fair, healthy and sustainable food throughout the country. - We will also strive for more efficient and inclusive distribution of locally produced, safe and healthy food using innovative business models and digital tools. 2. Enabling environments that incentivize fair, sustainable and healthy diets through policies and partnerships, including improving urban food governance, engaging citizens in collective action, incentivizing investments in sustainable food innovation and promoting peer-to-peer learning. Rikolto’s role will be to generate evidence that informs the search for solutions to chronic food system problems and that helps mainstream these solutions for impact.