The what-how-why of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Estimates show that approximately 1 billion people are today taking part in a cooperative system. May some of us be using our voices to shape our cooperative or, on the contrary, not actually aware that their are part of one , “the 1 member = 1 voice” system is, in fact, far from being reserved to the political left and second generation hippies. Indeed, more often that not, our banks or insurance providers are based on cooperative structures which have, for more efficiency, relegated the power of the cooperators to smaller groups of cooperators, organised as representatives —often being payed back for their involvement with bonuses and higher salarie). By browsing through various large scale cooperatives, we can in fact identify hierarchical structures (which the cooperative model primarily aims to shield from) which highly remind us of top-down corporative organisations, with one distinct variation: there is no selling of goods or services to “customers” by rather to “cooperators”. The difference seems only to be linguistic.

If the democratic model of the cooperative seems to have been fully assimilated and adapted to neo-liberalism, the original principles of the co-op however play an increasingly capital role in the development of new grass-root, local and independent food-farming movements —aiming to break away from multinationals and globalised industry giants— by striving to create structures able to give an equal voice to the farmer and the consumer.

Gathering sources from various cooperative farms, the press, internet comments, wannabe CSA representative ‘Urgenci’, to a UN funded census, this article aims to encompass as broad information on these new structures as possible, as well as to give tips on how to build or find a nearby co-op.