In recent years, national governments and international bodies have woken up to the urgent need to transform food systems towards fairer and more sustainable models as part of the global effort to respond to the rapidly worsening climate emergency. As policy and research priorities have shifted, grassroots initiatives have also proliferated across Europe, aimed at bringing together farmers and consumers into partnership to detach themselves from the industrial food system and organise their own food production and distribution at local scales on agroecological principles.
Although they employ a huge diversity of models and methods, they share three common goals: to provide affordable good food for citizens, a decent and stable livelihood for producers and to restore the health of agricultural and natural ecosystems. While many of these projects are highly productive and successfully deliver fresh fruit and vegetables and other staples to hundreds and sometimes thousands of local members, they remain small scale, scattered and limited in terms of scope of goods and accessibility to the majority of consumers. What would it take for these diverse and innovative experiments to initiate a larger-scale transformation of regional and national food systems? Are there examples we can learn from?
The Hansalim Life Movement in Korea represents an ambitious experiment in uniting producers and citizen-consumers into a single democratic movement for social transformation and creation of a comprehensive alternative food system. Starting as a single CSA-style multi-stakeholder cooperative of farmers and consumers with a single rice store in 1986, Hansalim has grown to become a national federation of 30 consumer 'Life Cooperatives' and 15 producer associations with a combined membership of 800,000 citizen-consumer households and 2,300 producer households, 242 stores across the country and a product range of over 4,000 goods. From the beginning until the present day, it has maintained an emphasis on social and ecological values and working towards the public good through joint activities between producer members and citizen members, education, publishing, environmental campaigning.
My research has demonstrated that Hansalim is best understood as multi-stakeholder organizations distinct from traditional consumer cooperatives. I have highlighted the previously unrecognized role of Korean traditional rural culture and institutions in the development of the cooperative movement in Korea. My research also offers a reinterpretation of the Hansalim Life Movement as an example of a form of council democracy setting it apart from conventional coop governance. I have also identified the important role of Korean philosophy in the democratic culture of the Hansalim Life Movement which acts as a powerful mitigation against the instrumentalisation of human-human and human-nature relationships inherent in western utilitarianism and which hinders the evolution of many cooperative initiative in the west.
