Reenergizing Fair Trade through CSA: A Sharing Economy Perspective

Sharing, obviously, is an indispensable component of human history. But as the market economy became dominating over the past 200 years, production and consumption became highly atomized. People seemed to lose instincts of sharing and habitually adapted to “either public or private”──a dichotomized view of goods, which is apparently an ideological myth. In real life situations, there are a large number of quasi public goods like club goods or common pool resources (Ostrom, 2010). The recent revitalization of the sharing economy is gaining popular attentions (The Economist, 2013). It is largely a result of the IT revolution but currently further going offline, promoting various experiments in daily lives. The defining characteristic of the sharing economy lies in ownership transformation. Comparatively, the existing social economy, including fair trade, is still private property based, aiming at the internalization of social costs and benefits. For instance, the stress on environmental and labor standards, in the language of economics, is to achieve a comprehensive accounting of external costs, and reflect the “genuine prices” of commodities. Under the current study potentials of reenergizing the fair trade movement through its integration with community supported agriculture, an alternative economic activity that not only moves from “fair” to “cooperation”, from “trade” to “co-production”, but also carries a greater touch of the sharing economy, will be explored.