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CSA Roots in Japan
by
Brewster Kneen
The CSA movement is inspired by Japan’s teikei concept, which is embodied in the dynamic Seikatsu Club. The 30-year-old Seikatsu Club in Kanagawa Prefecture has 50,000 members organized into 11 blocks. Members buy their food directly from the farmers in the region at a cost of 34,000 yen ($40) per month per family. The average member gets 60 percent of their food from the Seikatsu Club. Each block is governed by its own board and steering committee.
Building on this foundation, club members are now doing educational and political work. They have elected women to 34 positions on various council bodies in the prefecture. Success at a local level has prompted them to begin planning a new national community political party.
The Seikatsu Clubs, which can be found all over Japan and involve millions of people, are the successors of traditional consumer cooperatives that try to improve on, but not fundamentally challenge, the market principle.
Parallell with the transition from traditional co-ops to Seikatsu Clubs, was the development of the modern organic agriculture movement, which soon adopted the clubs’ guiding concept of teikei.
The Japan Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA) has made it a priority to establish the teikei system between producers and consumers. Teikei is an idea to create an alternative distribution system, independent of the conventional market. Though the forms of teikei vary, it is basically a direct distribution system. To carry it out, producers and consumers work to deepen their mutual understanding: both provide labor and capital to support their own growing, processing, and delivery system. They recognize that with the conventional market, where producers and consumers are completely separate, the sustainability of organic agriculture management is uncertain. JOAA summarizes its approach:
- chemical hazards are not merely a matter of techniques, but a symbol of the total malfunction of distribution systems, consumption structures, and agricultural policies;
- the swollen commercialistic market and food industry intercept the communication between producers and consumers, eventually misleading both of them;
- therefore consumers are also responsible for this vicious cycle, even if they are unaware of it;
- in order to correct it, producers and consumers should build an organically combined relationship between themselves and be involved in understanding and helping each other. This is what we have always emphasized in directing our movement.
Brewster Kneen is editor and publisher of The Ram’s Horn, a newsletter of food system analysis. For information, write: Box 3028, Mission, BC Canada, V2V 4J3.
Originally published in IN CONTEXT #42, Fall 1995, Page 29
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC42/VanEn.htm
Copyright (c)1995, 1997 by Context Institute
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