Alternative Food Networks by Alessandro Corsi & Filippo Barbera & Egidio Dansero & Cristiana Peano

Author:Alessandro Corsi & Filippo Barbera & Egidio Dansero & Cristiana Peano
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319904092
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

According to Marco, even the farmers’ association in Calabria, which is OTM’s biggest partner, sells most of its organic oranges to a local wholesaler, through which they probably end up on the supermarkets’ shelves. “In my opinion you can’t simply say ‘you’re evil because you went with the enemy.’ No. You have to take responsibility and say: ‘The ethical consumption movement which I belong to is unable to absorb the whole of your production’.”

Concluding Thoughts

The ex-workers and the consumers who collaborate with them in OTM are aware of the tensions and contradictions discussed in the previous section. Their attitude is mostly pragmatic, not radical for its own sake. In discussing these matters, they often talk about the state of ‘power relations’ or ‘relations of force’ to admit that there is little the farmers, and themselves, can do about these contradictions. These vivid expressions bring us back to the bigger picture of a corporate regime whose centrifugal forces tear open the places where food is grown, processed, distributed, and consumed. Financialization is a key factor in this process of economic opening, which reflects the escalating role that financial services play in our world. The crash of 2008 was the biggest wake-up call of this role to date, and its consequences are still being felt.

Drawing from a long line of thought in anthropology (Graeber, 2001, 2011; Gudeman, 2008; Hann & Hart, 2011; Hart, Laville, & Cattani, 2010; Narotzky & Besnier, 2014; Polanyi, 1944/2001, 1957), I have suggested that one way of approaching austerity is to see it as a planned reconfiguration of the boundaries between market and society. These boundaries have shifted back and forth many times since the birth of capitalism in the nineteenth century, the tension inherent to this process surfacing throughout our world. Alternative food networks are one example in which the principle of social protection, including the protection of nature, is applied in concrete experiments to try to contain the market principle. In the face of renewed assaults from the latter, four scenarios seem possible: generation, strengthening, obstruction, and irrelevance. In this chapter I chose to focus on the creation of new initiatives without silencing the many obstacles that stand in the way of envisioning, but especially of practising, food as a new commons.

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