When Students run AMAPs: towards a French model of CSA

Summary

Known as Associations for the Support of Peasant Agriculture (Association de Maintien de l’Agriculture Paysanne), AMAPs started to spread in France just after year 2000. These trust-based partnerships between urban consumers and farmers share some proximity with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organizations that developed in North America in the 1990s. Both organizations fight against large scale food chains and advocate for the necessity to change eating habits and mostly to switch to fresh seasonal organic products. They also stress the importance of setting human direct relations between the urban and agrarian areas. As AMAPs were also recently supported by students and introduced as CSAs in several French universities, this paper, backed by ethnographical fieldwork, describes how and why students decided to run CSAs on the campus of Aix-Marseille University (AMU). Students turned themselves into shareholders in AMAPs. They started to run them and deliver weekly fresh fruits and vegetables to three different university venues in AMU. Delivery is tailored for students needs and also allows students to experience collective farming.