A brief look at the AURACLE project

AURACLE began in 2022 with the funding of a ministerial thesis grant, a thesis currently being conducted by Juliette Benedetti. The project is part of a wider dynamic, that of the 2014 law establishing the Territorial Food Plans, TAP, aiming at the reterritorialization of food systems through the concertation of all the actors of the food chains: production, distribution and consumption.
The project focuses on short food and proximity circuits in the town of Nice, in the Alpes-Maritimes. The objective is to deploy geo-prospecting tools to identify short food and proximity circuits, to analyse the strengths and obstacles of this food chain in order to propose prospective scenarios for food sovereignty in the Nice area.
By financing two master's degree courses in 2022, Academy 3 enabled the project to collect and analyse a database more quickly, based on interviews with distributors in consumption and production areas. Three types of circuits were identified in this first phase of the project:

• short and local circuits, within a regional perimeter, through which typical regional products pass, and which allow a good flow of information from the producer to the customer;
•  local circuits, also within a regional perimeter ;
• short and local stages" with products processed locally but produced anywhere in the world.  

The project team around Stéphane Bouissou and Juliette Benedetti will then focus on the last phase of the project: the co-construction of geo-prospective scenarios for food sovereignty in the Nice area.