New Trends in the Social and Solidarity Economy Regarding Agriculture and Food: A Comparison between France and India

On the question of food and livelihood, international institutions and States call for efforts towards food security under the form of help in subsidies or better access to the market for farmers. Such efforts rely on large scale solutions and make food security depend on tall vertical institutions aiming at bringing change in a very large area at a time. On the other hand, small initiatives are born everywhere and take up on the question of access to healthy sustainable food. Farmers’ self-help groups, shared gardens, community supported agriculture, cooperative supermarket and other organisations make up this landscape and are being born everywhere. Such initiatives are often missed by observers as case studies of single organisations can not bring into light the global effort of such initiatives. Nevertheless, they can be put together and showed as being part of the same global movement. If their juridic forms, organisations, and goals are somewhat different, some trends can be established in the justification they offer to their action (Boltanski, Thévenot, 1991). In order to discover these justifications and establish trends, a study of the discourse and practices of such initiatives is offered in the following article. Namely, our study takes 20 initiatives dealing with agriculture and food. In order to find out trends, this article elaborates on the fieldwork of about 500 hours spent within said initiatives, and 50 interviews with project planners, coordinators, and motnitors. In order to show global trends, these initiatives have been chosen in two vastly different social and economic contexts: one takes place in Nancy, a medium French town, the other takes place in Ahmedabad, a very large Indian city. The results of the study show three major common trends between France and India, and between initiatives pertaining with small farmers, shared gardens, cooperatives and other social and solidarity initiatives. Firstly, there is a general call for localized, short food circuits, namely producers and consumers ask for a direct connection to each other, and even to grow the food they eat and eat the food they grow. Secondly, participants in said initiatives do not claim to be part of a recent innovative wave, but rather fall back on traditional ways to grow, sell, and cook food. Thirdly, despite the small size of such initiatives – with 200 participants at most and sometimes as small as 2 members – the ambition of these organisations is to change things on a global scale, make people from every path of life ask themselves questions and change their behaviour, and even, struggle against global climate change through small localized actions.