Abstract
During the 2000s in France, the rapid development of “AMAP” (Associations for the Preservation of Paysan [Small-scale] Farming)— which are a sort of appropriation/adaptation of the North American Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiatives—can be seen as part of a wider trend towards consumers’ growing awareness of and reaction to the environmental and health risks linked to the drive for productivity in agriculture. This case study shows the strength but also the limits of these kinds of collective action. On the one hand, the emergence of AMAPs can be seen as an immediate and concrete response to this fundamental shared concern, and a very coherent one insofar as it can combine not only the protection of environment with that of health, but also the defence of small-scale farming with the interests of consumers, fair-trade with local production, activism with conviviality, and so on. But on the other hand, it can also provoke tensions and encounter limits, such as the definition of this action as solidarity versus charity, the relative absence of the lower classes, the lack of land and of local organic food producers, and the need to construct a supra-local movement in order to influence national or European policies.
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- 1.
To indicate their vernacular origin, the main terms used by the people studied have been italicised and put in quotation marks. This is the case with “producers” and “consumers”, two major, inseparable categories used in vernacular descriptions of this kind of activism. The dichotomy between “producers” and “consumers” has been criticised by materialist feminism (Delphy 1998), especially as most of these “consumers” are women. Likewise, the use of the expressions “alternative food networks” and “initiatives” by several anglophone researchers has been subjected to critique (see e.g. Allen et al. 2003; Maye et al. 2007; Watts et al. 2005; Whatmore et al. 2003; Wilson 2013). In each case, it has become difficult to use these terms as analytical concepts.
- 2.
The French “paysan”—from which the English “peasant” is derived—is both an adjective relating to the agricultural, the rural and the countryside, as well as a noun denoting small farmers or peasants.
- 3.
At the end of 2011, there were ten of these, including Rhône-Alpes, Île-de-France, Midi-Pyrénées and Aquitaine.
- 4.
Some AMAP activists like to highlight these foreign inspirations and international developments, which allow them to reinforce the legitimacy of their approach (Ripoll 2009).
- 5.
Several chapters are dedicated to these groups in Pleyers (2011).
- 6.
- 7.
Though the French word “panier” (literally “basket”) is used, the produce often comes in paper bags. In anglophone countries boxes seem to be the norm, so “box” is used throughout this chapter.
- 8.
As Nost did in his study of three CSA farms in the US Midwest (Nost 2014).
- 9.
Werkheiser and Noll (2014) theorise the existence of three distinct “sub-movements” within the “local food movement”: the “individual-focused” sub-movement, the “systems-focused” sub-movement and the “community-focused” sub-movement, which each attributes different kinds of meanings to people and food.
- 10.
Strangely, some authors call CSA a social movement without discussing why they do so, following the example of Cone and Myhre (2000).
- 11.
For an initial exploration of the complex interplay of labels, practices and meanings, see Ripoll (2011).
- 12.
A “commodification” (which can be translated as marketisation) or a “conventionalisation”, to take up the different terms used in some critical analyses (Verhaegen 2011).
- 13.
On the importance of “localism” or “localization”, see, among others, Allen et al. (2003), Feagan (2007), Winter (2003). Just like the term “alternative”, “local” is primarily an everyday category, a descriptor used in argument, and a symbolic weapon in social relations of domination around food production and consumption—and only secondarily an analytical concept (Hinrichs 2003). In the 1980s and 1990s there were several academic debates about the status of the “local” and scale more generally, especially in critical human geography. On the complexity of this concept, see Herod (2011). On the distinction between “scale rhetoric” and “scale of praxis”, see Herod and Wright (2002).
- 14.
On this “entanglement” of resistance and domination, see Sharp et al. (2000).
- 15.
See Jackson (2010). In this text, Jackson is concerned with “anxiety”, but the term “insecuritisation” seems better if one wants to emphasise sociological processes instead of psychological phenomena.
- 16.
Genetically modified food, sometimes referred to as transgenic food.
- 17.
Among which are the National Federation of Organic Agriculture (FNAB), the Regional Associations of Organic Farmers (GRAB) as well as the Interprofessional Associations (Inter Bio) and the Associations of Organic Farmers (GAB), at the regional level.
- 18.
The dioxin chicken crisis occurred when Belgian chickens and their eggs were contaminated by being fed “animal meal”.
- 19.
Personal observations and research conducted for my doctoral thesis (Ripoll 2005).
- 20.
We must also note the emergence from 1991—on the CP’s initiative—of the Alliance Paysans, Écologistes, Consummateurs, who, as their name suggests, were set to be the crucible of a common front with non-agricultural organisations whose primary objective was to influence the direction of the new Common Agricultural Policy of 1992. It seems to have been both the sign and the location of relations with the activist networks which invested in the AMAPs ten years later, but it is difficult to know, without a dedicated study, if it was a driving force behind either this sequence of events or the birth of the AMAPs itself. During my first study, in 2007–2008, everything suggested that it had been “put to sleep” several years earlier, even though the name “Alliance” was taken up again when the first regional AMAP structure was set up in Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur and then in other regions.
- 21.
Le Consommateur, le Paysan et l’AMAP (The Consumer, the Paysan and the AMAP), presented by ATTAC Var, 2001, 34 minutes.
- 22.
This seems to be the view of the “militants pour la décroissance” (“activists for degrowth”) and the “objecteurs de croissance” (“growth objectors”) (Pailloux 2016).
- 23.
In signing this pact, they agreed to take environmental problems into account in all future political decisions.
- 24.
I develop an analysis of this history of the AMAPs, and of the paradox of a movement that claims that its cause is “paysan agriculture” yet which in most cases supports “organic agriculture”, in another text (Ripoll 2014).
- 25.
There was the case of a producer who was not a certified organic farmer but who a certified producer had vouched for (since his practices were acceptable despite the fact that it was impossible for him to become certified because of the size and thus autonomy of his farm), as well as a conflict that broke out in an AMAP a short while after my fieldwork ended over the question of whether a foie gras producer should be supported (foie gras is a product excluded from certification due to the treatment suffered by the animals). Finally, I will return later to the case of a “group of consumers” who joined forces with a non-certified market gardener.
- 26.
Here, we find the imperative of sacrificing selfish personal interests to attain a certain “civic grandeur” (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991).
- 27.
This confirms the results of research into Community Supported Agriculture (CSA ). See for example Cone and Myhre (2000).
- 28.
This concerns general principle number 9 of the AMAP charter: “Supporting producers towards autonomy , that is, the capacity to be master of their own decisions”. This is also a demand made by the charter of paysan agriculture.
- 29.
It should not be generalised either to all “producers” or to all products. We also encountered an organic market gardener who sold through his AMAP at particularly low prices, even lower than those he could have attained through large-scale distribution, or by selling conventional produce! This was also the case for meat parcels.
- 30.
This is also the case in the United States (Guthman 2008).
- 31.
In France, what we call the “middle classes” do not correspond to the US “middle class”, which has much more income and a much higher social status.
- 32.
Revenu minimum d’insertion (minimum income for social inclusion).
- 33.
Defenders of “petits paysans” and of “organic agriculture” do not hesitate to point out that the lower price of “conventional” products is only an apparent price, because it does not cover the entire cost of this kind of agriculture, with a good deal of “productivist” farmers’ revenue coming from subsidies—taxpayers, in other words—like public spending made necessary by “productivist” practices and the food industry (to deal with health problems, pollution, etc.).
- 34.
“‘Social justice,’ in particular, may be difficult to construct at a ‘local’ scale” (Allen et al. 2003).
- 35.
This expression was first proposed by Neil Smith (1992). I must admit that I used it in my own thesis (Ripoll 2005) without knowing it…. It is important to clarify that using it does not mean that scales exist prior to social relations: conversely, scales are always a social (and often conflictual) production/construction.
- 36.
One publication on the “alternative agrifood initiatives”—some of which had already existed in California for 30 years when the research was carried out—suggests that it is the contestatory dimension that tends to diminish: “Where in the early years AFIs combined the search for alternatives with a direct critique of existing industrial agricultural practices , that critical stance about conventional agriculture has more recently become subdued and framed as alternative rather than oppositional. We suggest that this may result in part from an attenuation of the linkages between these organizations and broader social movements for labor justice and environmental regulation, in the context of the neo-liberal revolution that weakened these larger movements after 1980” (Allen et al. 2003, p. 65). But the same authors later state that “it is possible that alternatives like CSAs may indeed begin to increase members’ interest and engagement in food-system problems and solutions. The importance of the growth of the organic market lies primarily in the opening it provides for the conscious ‘defetishization’ of food, enjoining people to think critically about the food system” (p. 72) and that “AFI participation may get people and communities to think about issues they may never have confronted or considered before, and to then become effective agents of agrifood system change” (p. 73).
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Ripoll, F. (2020). Associations for the Preservation of Small-Scale Farming and Related Organisations. In: Frère, B., Jacquemain, M. (eds) Everyday Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7_7
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