Histoires d’AMAP franciliennes : quand manger met le local dans tous ses états

The Community Supported Agriculture, born in France in the beginning of the XXIst century, have established themselves as a successful formula. These CSA, product of the meeting between a consumer group and one or several producers, are analyzed as an alternative model of consumption which breaks with traditional distribution supply chains as an agricultural model around new means of production (organic or at least sustainable farming), short food supply chains in a direct contact with the consumer. The key word is relocalisation, of both the production and the consumption, with all the effects of development expected in a new city-country synergy. Our intention here is a journey to Ile-de-France CSA, which the number borders upon three hundred with a profusion of “basket” initiatives, some of them very distant from the first inclusive logics. The analysis will focus on the consumer and farmer profile, and the choice for coming into CSA with the relationship to local as the predominant angle. Often presented as an obvious fact, the “local”, the very essence of the CSA approach, shows various significations according to the different actors. It refers to a non-material definition when it identifies itself as the sole delivering place; it can be tinged with materiality when it focuses on soil and climatic particularities of production; it favours immaterial when it expresses the relationship between a range of places and organizations more or less well located. The “local” becomes sometimes the whole Paris basin, sometimes the sole delivery place, sometimes the plot of land for the producer. Far from revealing a “already here local”, the CSA approach partakes of a creation of new relations between city and country, or even new social relations