Connections with other global organizations

International
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I just had a great conversation with the director of Urgenci, the international network of community supported agriculture. And I thought that would be great to have a wiki where we can share about international organizations that “resonate” with us and the discussion we have with them.

So I just start the list, don’t hesitate to contribute!

Urgenci

International network of community supported agriculture
http://urgenci.net/
“Bringing together citizens, small farmers, consumers, activists and concerned political actors at global level through an alternative economic approach called Local Solidarity-based Partnerships between Producers and Consumers.”
“It is a way of maintaining and developing small-scale organic family farming and of achieving local food sovereignty for each region and community worldwide.”
“URGENCI wants to vigorously promote all forms of partnership between producers and local consumers, all kinds of Community Supported Agriculture initiatives, as a solution to the problems associated with global intensive agricultural production and distribution.”

4 fundamental ideas

  • Partnership: This partnership is characterised by a mutual commitment to supply (by the peasants) and up-take (by the consumers) of the food produced during each season.
  • Local: this means promoting local exchange. LSPCCs are part of an active approach to relocalising the economy.
  • Solidarity: partnerships are based on solidarity between actors and involves: Sharing both the risks and the benefits of healthy production that is adapted to the natural rhythm of the seasons and is respectful of the environment, natural and cultural heritage and health.Paying a sufficient fair price up-front to enable peasants and their families to live in a dignified manner.
  • The producer/consumer tandem: is based on direct person-to-person contact and trust, with no intermediaries or hierarchy and no subordination.

The values of the network

Fairness, Solidarity, Reciprocity, and especially commitment to fair, stable prices and risk-sharing of agricultural production.
Each producer-consumer partnership is independent.
URGENCI aims to develop overall coherence at and between local, regional, national and global levels of projects to emphasize the relevant contribution of Community Supported Agriculture to a sustainable and inclusive world.

Discussion

Urgenci members are more centered on person-to-person relationships than on tools (see above “no-intermediaries”), but they see the potential of OFN and recognised the shared values, and they are interested to talk about it to their members. One of their objectives is to scale up “Work to disseminate our communities’ practices and values to larger audiences to build resilient and decentralised local food systems without compromising our ethos of small producer empowerment.” And OFN could be an infrastructure that could support them to scale up. The discussion is open, we’ll see where it goes :slight_smile:

2

I’m familiar with this group. I did some research on CSAs in China - and some of them were involved with URGENCI. I think it would be very interesting to find ways to collaborate with them. I’ve been asked by a number of CSA farmers here in Canada if OFN includes a facility/platform for CSAs. There is a very good program developed by a private firm here in Canada - http://www.harvesthand.com/CSA-Platform, who operate (in my view) in solidarity with our values. If I can get the Canadian instance launched - I’d like to approach them about the possibility of some kind of linkage - but I have no idea what that would mean for an open source and a privately owned platform to ‘talk’. Anyway - would be good to think about how OFN might ‘acquire’ or develop a CSA platform.