The paper explores how two self-legislated mechanisms, the participatory-guarantee-system and the collaborative price-mechanism, contribute to manifest an ecological ethos in food production systems on the example of the farmer’s association CampiAperti in Bologna, Italy. Through the lens of social reproduction (Fraser 2017), I apply its main critic of unpaid care work on farming. I argue that the feminist perspective in combination with commoning enables farmers to re-valorise care work in farming and can constitute conditions and methods that are conducive for implementing animal welfare and soil care. Following the notion of commoning as a social activity (De Angelis 2017), I will show how the self-certified PGS provides a fertile ground for altering the production system as well as it enforces the development of reciprocal relations manifesting mutual support, empowerment and trust (Diesner 2023). Further, there is a need for developing a new metrics for earning a livelihood that mirrors ecological production standards in order to avoid the capitalist logic of endless profit accumulation through the exploitation of animals, the soil and labour. In this light, the paper discusses the introduced collaborative price-mechanism by the farmers in conjunction with the necessity to self-govern their own markets. I will elaborate on the challenges of how care work in farming is evaluated when establishing a ‘just price’ (Edelman 2005), and elaborate on the difficulty in coalescing the ecological and economic dimension, also in relation to making local, organic food affordable. The paper concludes that commoning from a feminist perspective enforces the ecological ethos and economic dimensions in autonomous food production systems.
References
De Angelis, M. (2017) Omnia Sunt Comunia. On the Commons and Post-capitalist Transformation.London: Zed Books.
Diesner, D. (2023) Commoning the food system: Barriers, opportunities and resilience strategies in the case of CampiAperti, Bologna, Italy. (unpublished PhD-Thesis).
Edelman, M. (2005) ‘Bringing the Moral Economy back in to the Study of 21st-Century
Transnational Peasant Movements, Social Movement Studies’, American Anthropologist, 107(3), pp. 331-345.
Fraser, N. (2017) ‘Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism’, in Battacharya, T. (ed.) Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping class, recentering oppression. London: Pluto Press Ch.2, pp. 21-36.
