Gaëtan Vanloqueren on Food Social Security

If you prefer your discussions about food social security live and improvised on Zoom, you're in luck.

A couple of weeks back, I posted an FAQ on Food Social Security, a universal monthly entitlement, spendable only at producers and shops that meet democratically agreed criteria, funded through a mix of personal contributions, junk-food levies, wealth taxes, and the slow phasing-out of fossil fuel subsidies. It’s exciting and, for folk unfamiliar with it, a little confusing.

The idea originates in France and has spread to Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, with municipal pilots from Schaerbeek to Montpellier to Toulouse. This Tuesday in Barcelona, the cooperative el Pa Sencer presented a fully costed proposal to scale it to the entire Spanish state — 150 euros per person per month, 4.7% of GDP, less than Spain currently spends on the military. The event was chaired by the wonderful Sofía Monsalve Suárez, the current UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Who better to explain it than Gaëtan Vanloqueren. He’s an agricultural economist at the University of Liège and the University of Lille, teaches in Brussels, and was one of the architects of the Belgian modelling that showed how a national food social security could be funded budget-neutrally over a sixteen-year transition. We first crossed paths when Olivier de Schutter was UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Gaëtan has been one of the most rigorous voices on this terrain ever since.

Gaëtan was kind enough to volunteer to have our conversation recorded, and then spent far too long making sure the transcript was much better than the version I’d sent him. If you want more video/audio, let me know and I’ll see if I can find a way to do it that doesn’t tax the generosity of my guests.