(Re)localize Community Supported Agriculture people and actions around the world!
1. Red pin’s for international CSA networks;
2. Dark blue pin’s for National CSA Networks;
3. Light blue pin’s for local/regional CSA networks;
4. Baskets for emblematic or isolated CSA farms or CSA initiatives;
5. Houses with flag for past and future conference venues.
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 abunds in examples of specific groups of nonfarmers 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.
(…) Although consumers in the developed countries of the North are grasping the importance of eating locally grown food, and alternative economic projects based on solidarity, fair trade, and social and economic justice are springing up in many places around the world, the tide of multinational corporate globalization has yet to turn. The emergence of Teikei/CSA/ASC/AMAP/Reciproco/Voedselteams shows how consumers and farmers in many different localities are responding to the same global pressures. That one form of organization has so many names is an encouraging sign. Once they seize upon the basic principles, farmers and citizen-consumers in each culture are adapting CSA to their local conditions. Each local food project takes its shape from the tastes, talents, needs, and resources of its creators. The more we can learn from and support one another, the faster we will move toward sustainable and peaceful communities. »
From The World of Community Supported Agriculture, by Elizabeth Henderson, Keynote for Urgenci Kobe Conference 2010, “Community Supported Foods and Farming”, February 22, 2010.