Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an alternative food market used in Europe and in the USA. In this alternative market, farmers offer their production to consumers in the form of shares some months before they begin to produce their crops. Sometime later, during some months, consumers will receive the goods. Nowadays, several countries have a significant portion of their population that lives in poverty. Several public policies have been designed to reduce poverty in these countries and the stimulus to urban agriculture is one of these policies. However, poor urban farmers frequently have difficulties to purchase the inputs to continue with their food production. The continuous support of the local government associated to the continuous support of the local community could help those farmers to maintain their urban production. And for those poor urban farmers a CSA could be an alternative way of organization. The objective of this work was to get some information of CSAs from USA and find whether consumers and urban farmers from a poor Brazilian town would like to be engaged in this type of project. American CSAs generally occupied an area smaller than 2 ha, offered consumers different types of vegetables for at least four months and most of them used practices of organic production. However, there were several difficulties to run this project and the most important ones were planning and maintaining the production system. Some consumers from a town in Brazil were willing to engage in a CSA project mainly because they would receive fresh and organic products. Yet, poor urban farmers from this town did not show willingness to engage in a CSA project. Their main reason was that they were not able to control their production system. Further research could try to find if an improvement in the production system could lead farmers to engage in this type of project.
urban agriculture; poverty reduction; alternative organization
