Tekei - Japan
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"Teikei (提携) is a system of community-supported agriculture in Japan, where consumers purchase food directly from farmers. Teikei is closely associated with small-scale, local, organic farming, and volunteer-based, non-profit partnerships between producers and consumers. Millions of Japanese consumers participate in teikei. It is widely cited as the origin of community-supported agriculture around the world.
While there is some disagreement as to the "first" teikei group, the concept can be traced back to the mid-1960s, when a group of Japanese women banded together to purchase fresh milk. A general movement towards consumer-farmer partnerships in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s was driven by environmental issues and distrust of the quality of food in the conventional food system.
One of the founding teikei groups, the Japan Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA), founded in 1971, describes teikei as "an idea to create an alternative distribution system, not depending on the conventional market. Though the forms of teikei vary, it is basically a direct distribution system. To carry it out, the producer(s) and the consumer(s) have talks and contact to deepen their mutual understanding: both of them provide labor and capital to support their own delivery system.... Teikei is not only a practical idea but also a dynamic philosophy to make people think of a better way of life either as a producer or as a consumer through their interaction."
Teikei in Japanese means "cooperation", "joint business", or "link-up". In reference to CSA, it is commonly associated with the slogan "food with the farmer's face on it"."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teikei)
More information
- Co-op Farming in Japan. A look at Japan’s teikei system. DEC 24, 2016. BY EMI DO.
- To learn more about the teikei system, visit www.joaa.net/english/teikei.htm.
* Article: The alternative food movement in Japan: Challenges, limits, and resilience of the teikei system. By Kazumi Kondoh. Agriculture and Human Values 32(1):143-153, March 2014
"The teikei movement is a Japanese version of the alternative food movement, which emerged around the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similar to now well-known Community Supported Agriculture, it is a farmer-consumer partnership that involves direct exchanges of organic foods. It also aims to build a community that coexists with the natural environment through mutually supportive relationships between farmers and consumers. This article examined the history of the teikei movement. The movement began as a reaction to negative impacts of mechanized and chemically intensive agriculture promoted by the Japanese government. The movement experienced a rapid expansion in the early 1980s, and then gradually declined thereafter. The organic market expansion and certification system intersected with both cultural and gender role changes, impacting the teikei movement negatively. Consequently, the membership of teikei consumer groups has shrunk. Furthermore, the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident caused unprece dented damage to organic farmers in the affected regions. Despite the scientific uncertain about the safety level of radiation exposure, the organic farmers and the teikei consumer groups managed the situation and found a way to inspect radiation contamination. They did so with the support by networking with other teikei-related actors. This response to the nuclear power plant accident suggests that although the level of embeddedness presumably varies among teikei actors, ethics guided by the teikei principles are effective in forging a resilient partnership between farmers and consumers and in keeping the teikei system alive as an agent for social change."