An Untraceable Lever for Social Justice. Militant Excess of Alternative Short Food Networks
Alternative short food networks, embodied in France by the Associations pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne (AMAP) model, initially aimed to establish links of solidarity between consumption and production. These food systems have progressively been invested with additional stakes, particularly in terms of social justice, by aiming to give the greatest number of people access to food products that are inaccessible in conventional distribution channels. However, despite the work done within the amapien movement to achieve this social opening, the members of these systems remain strongly concentrated in the intermediate and dominant categories. This article aims to understand the principles at work in the low social openness of AMAPs. It uses qualitative data (biographical interviews and observations) produced during a survey conducted between 2013 and 2019 in the Lyon area, among the activist networks that coordinate the AMAP movement and among local AMAPs. The multiplication of issues projected onto the AMAPs generates internal contradictions, with which the members of AMAPs have difficulty coping. While the AMAPs are not equipped to implement greater economic accessibility of short circuits, the social openness of these systems appears likely to threaten the social interdependence on which the AMAP collectives have been formed locally. The difficulty of the AMAPs to include economically, symbolically and socially dominated categories owes much to the way in which these categories are excluded, upstream, from the processes of definition of the stakes operated by the AMAP activist networks and by the local authorities that intend to fight against food insecurity.