Farm to Fork Flow Diagrams for French Agricultural Sectors: A common template

Material flow diagrams are a visual representation of sector data that allows visualizing the size of the relative flows between the different actors. The RéfFlux project (2022-2023) is a project which purpose was, for different French sectors represented by their technical institutes, to equip themselves with a common methodology for representing public and expert data. This article presents the common approach adopted for the creation of a common reference framework for the different plant and animal sectors in a context of great diversity of data, actors, technologies and issues. We propose a reading grid for the diagrams that can be produced, in particular those posted online on the RMT FILARMONI website via 3 types of possible thematic analyses: questions of food sovereignty and sector dependency, questions of co-product flows linked to the bioeconomy and finally adaptation to household consumption, at home and outside the home. We show how this type of tool can contribute to informing the public debate by facilitating dialogue between stakeholders. The main objective of this work is to contribute to a better understanding of the origin and future of plant and animal production in France in order to inform the choices of public policies and private decision-makers.