EMERGING DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY - meet 28th FEBRUARY- 2nd MARCH 2014, VILLARCEAUX, FRANCE

between Rouen and Paris on the Oise

CALL FOR A SECOND EUROPEAN MEETING OF COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE MOVEMENTS and other EMERGING DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY, 28th FEBRUARY- 2nd MARCH 2014, VILLARCEAUX, FRANCE go to .................. http://www.urgenci.net/page.php?niveau=1&id=SECOND%20EUROPEAN%20MEETING%20-%202014 and............ http://www.bergerie-villarceaux.org/

1   COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE AND OTHER DIRECT/SHORT DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS AS AN ANSWER TO THE CRISES Calling all representatives of Community Supported Agriculture initiatives, regional networks, national networks and other related movements around Europe! Do you want to take part in this 2nd European meeting on CSA and emerging distribution systems for Food Sovereignty? This meeting is scheduled to take place from 28th February to 2nd March in Bergerie de Villarceaux, in the Paris region (France). The aims are to establish lasting relationships between Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) activities in Europe, and continue building a common vision for the CSA movement.

2   BACKGROUND: THE RISE OF CSA MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE Picture copyright: Jan Valeska. In recent years, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), Community Gardens, Grow-it-Yourself, solidarity purchasing groups/cooperatives, and allotments have been increasingly recognized in Europe as a key tool to strengthen the viability of autonomous small-scale and family farmers in the food chain, providing consumers with fresh, healthy, local, organic food, and a means of building more ecologically sound food systems. They have also been identified as a set of practices to achieve genuine Food Sovereignty, the right of people to democratically decide for themselves how food is produced and distributed. Field actors praise CSA as the most practical way of taking action today at grassroots’ level. It is a powerful, simple and non-confrontational way of reversing current economic, environmental and social trends in food production and consumption. Community Supported Agriculture and other emerging systems are definitely part of the answer: they share risks and secure fair prices, markets and cash flow for organic and agro-ecological farmers. They are generating a new type of sustainable family farming that is closely interconnected with local communities, cannot be delocalised, and fosters a solidarity-based economy and social connections between rural and urban communities. They are thus part of a broader Food Sovereignty movement and should be considered as an everyday implementation of Axis 2 of the Nyeleni Europe Declaration, “Changing the Way Food is distributed” . These elements are part of the kind of society to which we all aspire. They now need to be monitored, documented and supported to feed into a coherent, shared strategy. Major meetings have been decisive in consolidating this momentum, especially the Nyeleni Europe Forum on Food Sovereignty, held in Krems, Austria, 16th -21st August 2011, and the First European Meeting on CSA and Other Distribution Systems for Food Sovereignty held in Milan 10-12 October 2012.