During my educational path in the economic and managerial field I often found out myself considering the many effects of the economic global crisis started in 2008. I spent so much time considering the financial causes that has brought to such a crisis, the reasons why from US it hitted the economies all over the world, the possible remedies and preventions. From the media, in the streets and almost everywhere we heard that crisis means economic austerity for the public expenses and cause difficulties, mostly for the poor and medium social class, a reshaping of the local economic systems and a complicated allocation of young workers in the labor market. Many effects of this crisis have been closely experienced and we could directly touch how wide those effects could be in many different fields inside the economical and social system.
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A number of new ideas that have to do with improving our social and economic system in order to make it fit better to human needs and new models have been presented and developed.
I had the opportunity to partecipate to the first nacional meeting in the city of Porto about AMAP, a new socio-economic model to create proximity between the producer and the consumer. AMAP stands for Associaciòn para a manutencao da agricoltura da Proximidade (Association for the mainteinance of proximity agriculture) and it’s based on a simple yet important concept: to develop a direct, local and fair relationship between a consumers group and one or more producers, where risks and responsibilities are shared. |
The conference was divided in two main parts, a descriptive one in which the concepts were explained, and a partecipative one in which the participants, divided in groups and sitting on several tables, discussed in turns, with the presence of a moderator, about some elements of the european declaration of AMAP. The dynamic used it’s called world café and it’s really partecipative, for me it was interesting to observe people with different interests, both producers and consumers, sitting on the same tables and discussing and exposing their point of view trying to reach a common result.
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