Terra e Cibo, per costruire una comunità resiliente

Abstract

The paper describes a research-action experience promoted, by a Research centre belonging to Lombard Solidarity economy network, in two towns of Abbiatense, an agricultural area nearby Milan, to the purpose of testing the chances of building a new ‘social formation’ beginning with the definition of a collective goal, i.e. the defence of land/food as a common good. The project aimed on one hand at rebuilding sustainable agro-food supply chains in a context dominated by two agro-industrial crops, i.e. rice and corn for animal feed, on the other at implementing a hatchery for networked social enterprises connected to such newly built chains; taking, as the main (but not the sole) referents/users of the process, actors belonging to ‘needy’ social sectors, like migrants, returning families or the ‘new poor’. The first results show that, when the pivot actors – like innovating farmers, responsible citizens-consumers and ‘sensitive’ local governments – do not implement a transformation strategy working at the social and cultural level besides the economic one, single practices, even though pioneering, risk to fail in triggering processes pointed at freeing local economy from the dominant market’s ‘long chains’, or at a genuine reconstruction of territorial communities. In this view, the chance of implementing a ‘solidarity interchange system’, borrowed from a model by Euclides Mance, is proposed as a solution.