Scoreboard of food resilience in the overseas French territories[Élaboration d'un tableau de bord de la résilience alimentaire pour les territoires ultramarins français]

Faced with the current social, economic and geopolitical crises and global environmental pressures, food and nutritional security is a particularly difficult challenge in the French Overseas Departments and Regions (Guadeloupe, Guiana, Martinique, Mayotte, La Reunion). Food resilience is then characterized as the ability for a food system to simultaneously be sustainable and ensure food and nutritional security over time when these latter are hitting by multiple unanticipated shocks and disturbances. A scoreboard of food resilience, specific to the overseas territories, is proposed by means of 16 indicators relating to the dimensions of the food system (society, policy, food product, and consumption) and the economic, ecological, social, and nutritional challenges of sustainable food. By identifying the contrasts and similarities among these territories, our results highlight the challenges to develop food resilience: social, by reducing food insecurity, and economic and environmental, by reducing dependence on imports. The necessary decrease in food imports must go hand in hand with agricultural diversification and the capacity of the territory to efficiently transform local agricultural goods in accordance with the principles of agroecology in a context of small domestic markets. In addition, the heterogeneity of these territories relative to several socio-economic, ecological and nutritional aspects calls for specific answers. Only a set of place-based policies, focusing in the most vulnerable people, could both promote food resilience and stimulate development dynamics specific to each economy. Finally, replicating this scoreboard over time should serve as an interesting decision-making tool to inform about the potential ongoing progress and to design the suitable policy-mix.