Molly Scott Cato works as a green economist, seeking to develop a sustainable and just economy. She is a Reader in Green Economics at Cardiff School of Management and Director of the Welsh Institute for Research into Cooperatives. Her doctoral research into the labour-market in the Welsh Valleys was published by the University of Wales Press and more recently she wrote Market, Schmarket: Building the Post-Capitalist Economy.
She is a prime mover in the two-farm community supported agriculture project near Stroud. Stroud Community Agriculture Ltd is incorporated as Community Co-operative.
As a Community Co-operative every member has a vote, which puts everyone on an equal basis. Membership spreads the costs and risks involved in business.
Members hold quarterly planning meetings to set the direction for the farm. At an annual general meeting members elect a core group of (currently eight) volunteers to act on the plans set at members meetings. Read the minutes of AGMs.
Decisions are usually reached by consensus. The farm business is owned and controlled by the members, who employ the farmers. The farmers are members too, and sit on the core group, although they cannot take decisions about their own pay.
Customers enter the building and see a long list of produce to which a box holder is entitled.
Most of this is on display but there is also a ‘pick-your-own’ entitlement and another gift element is that flowers growing outside can be gathered. The produce is then selected and weighed and any unwanted vegetable is left in a gift box to be taken by others.Meat and eggs are available and charged for as taken. All this organic produce is sold at easily affordable prices.
Molly explains:
“The basic rule of the veg share is that you get three basics – carrots, potatoes and onions – every week, so if we don’t have them left (in this case due to increasing the number of shares this year) we buy them in. Mark never buys anything from outside Europe so sometimes we can’t get onions, if all European supplies have run out. These three staples are also available for sale in case people don’t find the quantity in the share adequate.“
Localise West Midlands, co-founded by Colin Hines and Pat Conaty, is working with a Cardiff consultancy to use the model of community supported agriculture to develop ideas for ‘community supported manufacturing’. See page 6 on the latest newsletter.
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The latest issue of the Co-operative News reports that Molly Scott Cato is making the case for co-operatives taking a lead in mainstreaming local food in local stores.
Speaking to the Journal of Co-operative Studies, she has argued that the current food system is insecure, causes environmental damage and could leave the country in a very vulnerable position. She suggests that the Movement offers “an enormous resource not used as well as it could be for getting local food to local shops.” Citing successes such as the Co-operative’s “Grown By Us” campaign, she argued that much more could be done and, just as the Movement had put pressure on other retailers to follow its example on Fairtrade products, it could do the same with local food.
In 2009 Co-operative and financial journalist Paul Gosling was commissioned to write a discussion paper, celebrating the Co-operative Movement’s contribution to social, economic and environmental well-being. Paul also focussed on the growing concern about food: security of supply, quality and price, global food stocks, oil production peaking and the need to reduce carbon emissions which prompts a growing demand for more local production rather than the long-distance trade in cheap food.
He pointed out that the Co-operative Group is the largest food producer in the UK and has many retail outlets in high streets – a good environmental move as fuel prices rise and out-of-town shopping sales decline.
Good practice is under way in co-operative societies in Scotland and Wales which have developed a large range of locally produced products and the Midcounties Co-operative has continued and extended the Oxford, Swindon & Gloucester Society’s “Local Harvest” initiative which puts a range of produce sourced from across its trading area on to the shelves in a number of Co-op supermarkets.
150 products from 17 suppliers in its trading area are sold under the’Local Harvest’ brand, including dairy, meats, eggs, seasonal fruit and vegetables, breads and flour, beers and soft drinks, dried whole-foods, breakfast cereals, ice cream, cakes.
These have been either manufactured or produced within a 40 mile radius of the store.
Molly’s case for the co-operative stores mainstreaming such practice should be heeded.
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