The Role and Significance of Coordinators for Community-Supported Agriculture

Abstract

    The purpose of this article is to study the impact of coordinators for community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, using the Kome Mame project as a case study. The Kome Mame project is a collaborative effort involving organic farms, a for-profit company, and a non-profit organization (NPO).
    As contemporary food systems expand geographically and become more complex, there is a growing practice by local food producers in Europe and the United States to rebuild the relationship between food and agriculture. CSA is a common effort in the local-food movement and has become gradually more popular in Japan. The Kome Mame project supports a rice monoculture CSA that is jointly implemented by organic farms in Ogawamachi, in the Saitama prefecture, and a building-renovation company in Saitama City. In this project, the company buys up rice produced by farmers who have adopted organic farming; meanwhile the company's employees have the opportunity to experience farming as part of their employee training. These exchanges have yielded direct face-to-face relationships among the farmers and company workers.
    The NPO's role is to coordinate matchmaking between famers and companies, utilize those connections to build a mechanism for developing distribution channels, and facilitate human-resource exchanges and support stakeholder relationships.
    Broadly speaking, a coordinator is someone with a comprehensive perspective of the CSA system, has a good read on current social trends, has a strong professional network, has expertise in a range of related areas, and who is cable of organizing and coordinating relationships.
    Over the course of the establishment and popularization of a CSA, the coordinator's role as a manager of the relationship between food and agriculture will become increasingly important. The challenge that lies ahead is whether a person acting as a CSA coordinator can build that role into a socially recognized profession.