La Ceinture Alimentaire de Wallonie Picarde

About La Ceinture Alimentaire de Wallonie Picarde

CA-WAPI, the Ceinture Alimentaire de Wallonie Picarde, is a citizen-and-farmer collective working to strengthen a local, durable, and accessible food system in Wallonia Picarde. It brings together producers, citizens, associations, institutions, and economic actors around a shared goal: increasing the share of locally consumed food while rebuilding shorter, more resilient supply chains.

The organization grew out of a grassroots mobilization that began in Tournai in 2018 and expanded into a regional network. Today, it positions itself as a facilitator and connector: it coordinates projects, supports local initiatives, and helps structure the missing links between production, distribution, transformation, and access to food.

Its work is rooted in a broader transition agenda that combines agricultural resilience, fair producer remuneration, social access to healthy food, and territorial cooperation across Wallonia Picarde.

Core Values

• Local food sovereignty: The collective aims to increase the share of food consumed locally by rebuilding regional food chains and reducing dependence on globalized supply systems.
• Accessibility and solidarity: It works to make healthy, organic, local food accessible to more people, including households with limited means, while ensuring fair prices for producers.
• Sustainability and respect for living systems: The organization promotes diversified farming that respects soils, biodiversity, the environment, and the people who produce food.
• Collective action: Its model is based on cooperation between citizens, farmers, associations, and institutions, with shared governance and mutual support across the territory.
• Resilience: By diversifying production and strengthening local distribution and transformation, CA-WAPI seeks to make the region more resilient to climate and economic shocks.

Unique Aspects

• Regional collective with a grassroots origin: The initiative began with citizen mobilization in Tournai in 2018 and later expanded into a wider Wallonia Picarde network, showing a bottom-up territorial build-out rather than a top-down program.
• Part of the Crealim network: CA-WAPI is an active member of Crealim, the federation of food belts and food networks in Wallonia, which helps it share tools, expertise, and a common voice at regional level.
• Dual role as coordinator and enabler: Rather than operating only as a single project, CA-WAPI coordinates multiple initiatives, supports autonomous partners such as La Coop Alimentaire, and helps other actors replicate successful models like the solidarity baskets.
• Strong territorial anchoring: Its projects are explicitly designed for Wallonia Picarde and are supported by a broad local ecosystem of producers, social actors, cultural organizations, and public institutions.
• Policy and public-awareness reach: Beyond food distribution, the collective also works through festivals, documentaries, and a 2024 memorandum to influence public debate and local decision-making on food transition.