Community Supported Agriculture

In the recent decades, the pressures of an expanding agro-industrial model of food production and the corporate control over many aspects of the food system has given rise to manyfold responses globally by consumers and farmers, which are about the building of trust-based direct relationships between producers and consumers in order to enable people to have access to healthy food, and to ensure decent livelyhoods for producers. The focus in this material is on one of those responses : Community supported Agriculture (CSA), or Kumpanuusmaatalous in Finnish.

Although there are now many variations, the basic CSA model is based on community members helping to provide a portion of the farmer’s yearly budget through purchasing “shares” for a season’s harvest in advance of the growing season. Community Supported Agriculture is about bringing farmers and people who eat their produce closer to each other to share more of the risks and rewards of farming and give the farmer a helping hand. This social organisation forms a web of mutual support and helps foster a better sense of community. The international grassroot network of all forms of regional and Local Solidarity-based Partnerships for Agroecology (LSPAs) Urgenci, has estimated that up to one million people are currently involved in CSA initiatives in Europe.

CSA schemes foreground the need to help farms and farmers practising sustainable agriculture, and this is a very important need to be acknowledged and acted upon. But there is further (related) significance and potential to capture and bring to the forefront as to why our CSA’s matter.

In the following material, CSA’s are first of all contextualised as being about the furthering of Food sovereignty. Thoughts are then shared on the value of CSA’s as social and ecological pedagogical processes and on how CSA’s are addressing the urban rural divide. Followingly CSA’s and the possibility to realise their potential, are placed within a wider envisioning and building of solidarity economies of furthering our commons and the commoning around them. CSA’s are then presented as having the potential to give headway to systemic change/transformation in our communities and society at large, locally and globally. Following this, Oma maa food cooperative is presented as an example of a CSA in Finland, which is unique in its building of year around food system change. The material ends with some reflections both for those wanting to join or start a CSA.