When people in Liege decided they wanted a different future, they started with food. In 2012, 600 residents came together for a two-day gathering and asked themselves a simple but radical question: how can we ensure that, within a generation, most of the food eaten here is produced locally under good ecological and social conditions?
More than a decade later, that citizen movement has grown into Ceinture Alimen-Terre Liégeoise (the Liege Food Belt) and a metropolitan Food Policy Council that now brings together farmers, co-operatives, supermarkets, health professionals, cultural organisations, trainers, public institutions, media, citizens and politicians around one table.
This autumn, participants in the CLEVERFOOD peer-learning programme visited Liege to see how this Food Belt model works in practice, and what other cities can take home.
We are really committed to develop local, sustainable and socially just food system.
A citizen movement that changed the rules
The Liege Food Belt started as a grassroots alliance of transition groups, co-operatives and activists. Today, it is a 12-year-old association with a dedicated team working on five core missions: territorial coordination, structuring local supply chains, awareness and community engagement, support for professionals, and capitalising knowledge.
“We are really committed to developing a local, sustainable and socially just food system,” explains Virginie Bartholomé, who coordinates the metropolitan Food Policy Council for the Liege Food Belt.
What began with a boom in citizen-led co-operatives – from milling and brewing to community groceries – quickly moved into politics. In 2017, local campaigning around the health impacts of endocrine disruptors – chemicals that interfere with the body’s hormone system – helped push Liege municipality to adopt a motion to remove these substances from school canteens.
By 2022, the city had committed to 100% organic food in kindergartens and schools, and food had become a pillar of Liege’s 2025 city strategy. At regional level, Wallonia is one of the few territories in Europe with a dedicated food policy, and Liege’s work feeds directly into that framework.
Inside Liege’s Food Policy Council
The Liege metropolitan Food Policy Council is only around three years old, but covers 24 municipalities – home to some 625,000 people – and brings together 180 members.
Members include citizens, producers, co-operatives, large and small retailers, logistics actors, health professionals, cultural organisations, training bodies, media, and elected representatives. This diversity is intentional.
“The first objective of the Food Policy Council is to gather all those people and to give them the space so that they can talk with each other and better understand the vision of the other,” says Bartholomé. “We really try to combat preconceived ideas.”
The Council’s work is organised around regular plenary meetings and a set of thematic working groups. Twice a year, all members come together in plenary to review progress, share updates and agree on priorities for the next period. Alongside this, six thematic working groups focus on key areas of the food system: food security, One Health approach, agricultural land preservation, land access for municipal farming, community kitchens, developing a robust local ecosystem.
We really try to combat preconceived ideas.
Participation is kept deliberately open and flexible. Non-members can be invited to join specific working groups to contribute their expertise on issues such as land access or logistics, helping to keep the Council’s work grounded in real needs and practical experience.
Before launching the Council, the Liege Food Belt led a detailed diagnosis of the local food system, combining data analysis with interviews with around 60 stakeholders from across the 24 municipalities, from rural areas to the urban core. That work helped define an initial list of priorities that members then refined and voted on, narrowing them down to six core themes for the first cycle of work.
For visitors in the CLEVERFOOD peer-learning programme, this combination of deep territorial knowledge and open governance was a key lesson.
“It gave me a clear vision of how our local food council could be organised,” said Ellen Fetzer, from the citizen co-operative in Nürtingen. “We will try to transfer this concept to our local context. It was inspiring to experience the multi-level governance approach implemented in Liege, combining local action with broader goals for the landscape of the metropolitan zone.”
Short supply chains made real
Liege’s food transition is not just about governance. It is also about concrete infrastructure and new business models that make sustainable food viable for farmers and affordable for residents.
Terra Alter is one of the flagship examples: an organic vegetable processing hub where local organic produce is washed, peeled, cut and packaged for public canteens in schools, kindergartens, elderly homes and hospitals.
At a time when sustainable food communities face some opposite winds, we want to believe that the relevant seeds and roots of these social innovations have been planted deeply enough in the territory to endure the turbulences.
Funded with €7.6 million from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, on land provided by the City of Liege, Terra Alter creates a direct link between local producers and public kitchens. It allows canteens to serve fresh rather than frozen vegetables, opens a stable market for local farmers and, crucially, buys vegetables that would otherwise go to waste because of irregular size or shape.
The hub is part of a wider Walloon initiative to create short-supply-chain food hubs across the region, with a similar site planned for Charleroi.
Another stop on the study visit was Oufticoop, a co-operative social grocery store launched in 2019. With around 600 members in 2024, Oufticoop is owned and run by its members, who buy a €25 share and volunteer three hours a month in the shop. More than half of the products are local, prices are around 20% lower than other organic shops, and the co-operative does not pay dividends.
Oufticoop also has a dedicated working group on inclusion, exploring how to involve and support lower-income households. The co-operative works with local medical houses to promote healthy eating and better food access.
“It’s a source of inspiration,” said Campobasso’s representative, “It demonstrates to those who are taking their first steps in the field of food policy that there are many ‘small’ actions that can be put into practice to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed.”
Building resilience in uncertain times
Liege’s long-term commitment and the depth of its food ecosystem is a key source of resilience.
“The evolution of the food ecosystem of Liege will be very interesting to observe in the coming years, in terms of resilience,” reflected Laurent Comeliau, from Nantes Metropole. “For more than a decade, grassroots movements and social economy actors, gathered by the Liege Food Belt, have been pioneers and innovators… At a time when sustainable food communities face some opposite winds, we want to believe that the relevant seeds and roots of these social innovations have been planted deeply enough in the territory to endure the turbulences.”
That warning about “opposite winds” is not abstract. Like many civil society organisations in Europe, the Liege Food Belt is facing major funding cuts linked to political change at regional and national level.
“We lost a lot of our budgets,” Bartholomé explains. “EU funds could really help us to keep on doing what we’re doing… projects that last four or five years give you time to do things properly and to build stability.”
At the same time, Liege continues to use every lever it can at local and regional level – from public procurement to land access – while also engaging, when capacity allows, in debates on EU frameworks such as the Common Agricultural Policy and discussions around a food exception in EU procurement rules.
Why exchanges like the CLEVERFOOD programme matter
EU funds could really help us to keep on doing what we’re doing… projects that last four or five years give you time to do things properly and to build stability.
For Bartholomé, joining CLEVERFOOD is part of a broader strategy to stay connected and keep learning. “You need to be linked with others, especially if you work on food, you know it’s a really complex question,” she says. “It’s really important to see and to observe and to talk with other people that are making the same projects in different regions.”
“Exchanging experiences on food policy design and implementation in Europe is fundamental to reinvent the projects that have been implemented over the last decade and to inspire new emerging projects,” said Rosario Oliveira, from the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon.
The Liege visit sits alongside CLEVERFOOD’s wider work on transformative governance for food systems, including a recent conference in Copenhagen and training on stakeholder engagement delivered with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Eurocities. Together, these activities are helping cities and regions rethink how they design, govern and finance the food transition.
Liege shows what can happen when a strong civic movement, innovative social economy actors and committed local authorities pull in the same direction; and when food is treated not just as a commodity, but as a public good and a driver of wider territorial change.
At a time of political uncertainty and shrinking budgets, this story of long-term organising, institutional innovation and practical experimentation offers valuable lessons for cities across Europe looking to transform their food systems from the ground up.
