Abstract
This paper explores food commoning through an ethnographic case study in Catalonia as our primary site while the Norwegian case is juxtaposed as a comparison, two agriculturally and economically different European countries. The ethnography analyses cooperation networks between organic food producers’ and consumers’ involving different nodes of community gardening initiatives, self-employed growers, local farmers and all of them under a unique cooperative integrating a community economy. The result it is a myriad of exchange practices ranging from reciprocity and barter to market exchange without intermediaries through on-line platforms. Along these exchanges different options of currency intervene giving rise to novel social and cooperative relations. Similar initiatives in Norway show less variation and are less experimental regarding forms of payment but share similarities in relation to material articulations, concerns and forms of alternative practice. Although these novel forms do not represent a complete break from the more standardized supply chains, and hence from the oppositions/contradictions of production and consumption, the participants see themselves as contributing to a more general process of de-commodification of food. We explore the extent to which the meaning and moral values are mutually constituted in relation to socioeconomic exchanges and environmental caring that each person experiences based on different forms of cooperation and reciprocity. Food, we suggest, is more than a commodity on the market that we may influence through our role as consumers. It is a significant focal point connecting our lives to those of others that articulates one’s relations to society in a political manner.
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Notes
Personal communication from the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) ordering centre coordinators’ in 2015.
Distribution is considered by the cooperative as a public service because food is a basic need, people in charge of distribution are paid by the cooperative with a social currency called “ecobasics” that can only be used to pay for products considered basic and produced inside the cooperative.
Abbreviations
- ANF:
-
Alternative Food Networks
- CES:
-
Community Exchange System
- CIC:
-
Catalan Integral Cooperative
- CCPAE:
-
Catalan Council of Organic Agricultural Production
- CSA:
-
Community Supported Agriculture
- EU:
-
European Union
- MAPAMA:
-
Ministry of food, agriculture and environment
- SC:
-
Social Currency
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2017 “Sovereignty, Contestation and ‘the Economy’”/”Sharing economies and the commons” International Conference organized by SOSCO (Research Group Sovereignty and Social Contestation) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. This paper has been written thanks to a funding of the program NILS Science and Sustainability, ABEL Individual Mobility of Researchers (012-ABEL-IM-2014).
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Mestres, S.G., Lien, M.E. Recovering Food Commons in Post Industrial Europe: Cooperation Networks in Organic Food Provisioning in Catalonia and Norway. J Agric Environ Ethics 30, 625–643 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9691-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9691-6