CALL FOR COMMENTARIES Submission Due June 5, 2013 2,500 words maximum Edited but not peer-reviewed; query form required The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development  soliciting commentaries on food systems research priorities for the next...

African groups have developed the statement below, to highlight the dangerous vision of the G8's  "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition" On June 8th, UK Prime Minister David Cameron will...

I read a very interesting article this morning by Gustavo Duch in LaJornada (if you read Spanish, you can read it here). He concluded the article in a way that really...

There is a new issue of Rural 21 out on food losses. "Roughly one third of the food produced globally for human consumption is lost or wasted – 1.3 billion tons...

The G8 countries are implementing a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in six African countries that will facilitate the transfer of control over African agriculture from peasants to...

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development , the only international, peer-reviewed journal focused on the emerging field of food and agriculture–based community development,  has a call for papers on Cooperatives and Alternative Food Systems Initiatives

Cooperatives have historically been, and still are, important institutions in the global economic landscape, and have strong roots in food and agriculture. Conventional agriculture cooperatives work to increase the marketing power of farmers by pooling their products to achieve economies of scale. Traditional consumer cooperatives focus on increasing buying power to meet member needs. Recently there has been a surge in cooperative alternative food systems initiatives in the form of cooperative food hubs, cooperative local food networks, cooperative farmers’ markets and box schemes, worker‐owned food cooperatives, cooperative value chains, and cooperative food buying clubs. These initiatives represent new forms of collective engagement of consumers, producers and other actors as “food citizens” within “civic food networks,” the social/solidarity economy, and a “civic agriculture.” Cooperative food systems initiatives are differentiated from conventional cooperatives in that they:

  1. reconnect farmers and consumers in more direct and meaningful ways;
  2. sell to local and regional markets and through alternative networks such as CSAs, farm‐to‐school programs, farmers’ markets; or
  3. promote food production, distribution, and consumption processes that are environmentally sound or socially just.
They are organized by farmers (such as producer co‐ops or farmer groups), by consumers (such as buying clubs or consumer cooperatives), by both (multistakeholder co‐ops), or by workers and through cooperation to pursue social, economic, and political ends that are challenging to realize as individuals.