ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT ON THE ORGANIC SECTOR HORIZON COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE IN HUNGARY

Summary

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) gained increasing attention and experienced rapid growth in the US and Western Europe over the past 25 years as a special form of direct marketing where producers and consumers form an alliance in a relationship based on mutual trust, openness, shared risk and shared rewards.Using local, organic food-systems as the point of departure the paper aims to explore the farm enterprises that follow practices of CSA in Hungary. Our study confirmed that CSA can be identified as a sustainable rural business strategy for innovative organic farmers and has transformative potential for food-system localization, providing decent livelihood, good care of natural resources and strengthens social cohesion within the rural-urban interface in Hungary.