Community Supported Agriculture - CSA

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a concept that links citizens with local farmers and farms with environmentally friendly practices through a harvest partnership. You become a "partner" of a farm by purchasing a share of the harvest in advance. Participating vegetable farms deliver weekly baskets of various vegetables to a fixed point in a neighbourhood. The livestock farms offer their various cuts for an initial deposit.

A win-win partnership Community Supported Agriculture offers the citizen : - the privilege of a direct link with a farmer ; - access to healthy, freshly picked vegetables; - a role as an important player in the development of organic and local agriculture in Quebec and food sovereignty.

It offers farms : - the support of a group of committed citizens ; - the guarantee of an income early in the season; - the possibility of planning production and harvests in advance.

It requires the citizens : - to collect their basket each week from the drop-off point ; - to pay in advance for their vegetables or meat; - to cook according to the contents of their surprise basket and to participate in the project.

It requires farms to : - rigorous planning and fine management of diversified production or organic livestock farming; - a link with several "clients" who have become "partners" rather than with a distributor.

CSA also cares for the issue of the right and access to affordable healthy food for all rather than relegating the poor to eating junk food. Community Supported Agriculture groups have invented many different ways of ensuring that this is possible: from solidarity shares covered by other member’s collective financial contributions, to the possibility often used in Germany of people paying what they can afford, as long as the total contribution meets the producers’ needs, working shares where consumers can work a given number of hours on the farm to partially pay for their share and also shares for vulnerable populations, subsidized by Local Authorities. These are key issues for Social and Solidarity Economy, as they clearly prioritize the human right to food over profit, while ensuring decent incomes for producers (exerpt from Isa Alvarez, Urgenci, at Strasbourg).

Equivalent concepts

Local Solidarity-based Partnerships for Agroecology initiatives (LSPA)

History of the concept

All the way around the world in countries as diverse as the United States, Japan, France, China or Mali, people who farm and people who eat are forming communities around locally grown food. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), Teikei, AMAP, Reciproco, ASC – the names may be different but the essence is the same. Active citizens are making a commitment to local farms to share the risks and the bounty of ecological farming. A century of “development” has broken the connection between people and the land where their food is grown and in many countries, north and south, a few decades of free trade have driven family-scale farms to the point of desperation. A long series of food scandals – illnesses from food-borne pathogens, milk and other products contaminated with GMOs and chemical pollutants – have led to a crisis of confidence in imported foods from industrial-scale farms. CSA offers a return to wholeness, health and economic viability.

Human history abounds in examples of specific groups of non-farmers being connected with specific farms—the medieval manor, the Soviet system of linking a farm with a factory, or the steady attachment of particular customers to the stand of a particular farm at a farmers’ market. In Cuba today, all institutions are obliged to be self-sufficient in food, so companies and schools have farms or garden plots. But none of these is like the form of organization we refer to as CSA. From Elizabeth Henderson'kKeynote for Urgenci Kobe Conference 2010, “Community Supported Foods and Farming” February 22nd, 2010.

Read the rest of the article on the history of Local Solidarity-based Partnerships for Agroecology initiatives (LSPA) around the world on Urgenci website here.

CSA in the world

Some documentation on CSA around the world

• China CSA network, Atlas of Utopias, 2018
• A brief overview of Community Supported Agricuture (CSA) in the Philippines post-2014 disaster, Judith Hitchman, 2016
• Fair Trade and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as Middle Class Social Movements in Hong Kong, Sheilla van Vijk,2015
• Collective farm shops and AMAP (French CSA) in southwest France. Commitment and delegation on the part of producers and consumers, Stéphane Girou, 2008

Main networks working on this issue

The URGENCI network brings together Local Solidarity Partnerships between Producers and Consumers (LSPC) actors worldwide, all kinds of Community Supported Agriculture initiatives, as a solution to the problems associated with global intensive agricultural production and distribution. Urgenci is a member of RIPESS Intercontinental and RIPESS Europe.

Links

With socioeco.org

Matching Socioeco.org thematic keyword

With Ripess NL articles or position papers

You will find the articles of the Ripess Newsletters by Urgenci here.

Examples

• What are we going to eat tomorrow around the Mediterranean sea ? Article from the RIPESS Europe newsletter - April 2022, Jocelyn Parot

• Preparing for the event “Social Economy, the Future of Europe” – Strasbourg, May 2022: Urgenci contribution, Article from the RIPESS Europe newsletter - March 2022 - March 2022,Judith Hitchman, Urgenci

• URGENCI’s e-learning hub, Article from the RIPESS Europe newsletter - January 2022

Link to pedagogical tools in socioeco.org

• 10 things to consider when you start a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture):2020

• CSAct! Learn the skills, gain the knowledge, Be part of CSA, 2019

• The CSA farmer to farmer booklet, 2019

• Be Part of CSA! Supporting Booklet for Training on Community Supported Agriculture, 2016

Links with other concepts in Solecopedia:

• agroecology,
• short local supply chains or short circuits

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