Food Co-ops, community supported agriculture and buying groups represent the means to access affordable, ethical and sustainable foods, according to research released last week by the Soil Association.

The report, Food Co-ops, A Viable Supermarket Alternative?, produced at the end of the Making Local Food Work programme revealed over 400 enterprises were supported by the initiative with many opportunities for development across the UK.

The Soil Association said this confirms consumers are keen to embrace new community food initiatives ensuring food is local, sustainable and affordable. Buying groups involve people who regularly get together to buy local and organic food. Though groups vary greatly in size, by pooling buying power and ordering food in bulk direct from farmers or suppliers, they buy good quality food at a more affordable price.

Speaking about the report, Traci Lewis, Project Manager at the Soil Association said, "Food co-ops and buying groups help support access to quality affordable food, they're especially relevant where people don't have any other options outside of the supermarket but want to access affordable local and organic produce. What’s inspiring about the report is it shows the commitment people are willing to make to ensure the success of initiatives like this. It requires people to work together with friends, colleagues or neighbours to shop differently, when supermarkets often are the easy option."

Cooperative food production equally important

Further successes in Europe also feature including Biocoop in France, a national organic distribution co-op with over 320 independently run Biocoop member shops and Gruppo di Acquisto Solidale network, Italy (GAS) a large scale buying group with over 700 member groups each with numbers varying between 10-300 families.

In continental Europe local production has also gained ground in recent years, particularly in the form of community supported agriculture projects; CSAs currently feed an estimated 40 million people across the EU. The approach is especially popular  in France, where an AMAP charter (protecting intellectual property) has been set up to ensure corporate interests do not purloin the image and good name of community supported agriculture.

Cooperative and community-led models of production, as well as consumption, were discussed at the Oxford Real Farming Conference in January. There, speakers from the Plunkett Foundation revealed that the Cooperative economy has one billion members worldwide and employs over 100 million people.  

In addition to producers' groups and businesses, this includes community groups, such as the non-profit Robin Hood's Bay Mesh Net Cooperative of villagers in Rural East Yorkshire, who joined together to bring high speed broadband to their region, after government promises of better internet access were repeatedly stalled.

Research from the Making Local Food Work project also revealed the community food sector in the UK is worth £150 million per year. The research, conducted by SERIO at Plymouth University, focused on five core sub sectors: community-owned shops; collaborative farmers' markets; country markets; community supported agriculture initiatives and food co-ops. These sub sectors comprise some 1,030 individual enterprises, with a combined turnover of around £77 million.

EU leaders have lent their weight to the model, suggesting such alternative economic models as CSA, buying cooperatives and community food initiatives, radical examples of which were forged by Greek farmers opting to self-organise and sell direct to their local communities last year, are effective methods of shortening supply chains, balancing power and minimising waste, thus boosting sustainability. These models also sustain much higher employment than their equivalents and keep money circulating in local economies for longer.

Supermarkets still hold sway

However, although the Plunkett Foundation's mantra that "economic change is the best way to deliver social change" may be inspiring many around the country, and the rest of Europe, to form different relationships with their food and their neighbours, the supermarket model continues to hold sway in the UK, where 93 percent of all food and non-alcoholic beverages are bought in branches of a handful of large supermarket chains.

Nevertheless, as well as making food production more directly responsive and often as a result more sustainable, according to the Plunkett Foundation, cooperative models, and the shorter supply chains they tend to inhabit, increase understanding and solidarity between farmers and the communities they serve. The Plunkett Foundation's Mike Perry said this improves the model's resilience in the current economic climate, meaning potentially better returns for farmers and a better deal for consumers.   

In December 2012, research by Making Local Food Work discovered that 54 percent of community food enterprises have been trading for five years or less, add to this the figure that such enterprises have a 95 percent survival rate over 20 years, compared to a 47 percent for other small businesses and the picture of community food begins to look more promising; sustainable local food may well have a bright future in the UK.