The study tour in France was held on the week 5th-9th march 2018.
It was the second tour and again a very fruitful and diverse set of visits with a presentation of multi-stakeholder cooperatives (SCIC), a collective project to support new people in agriculture who can experiment during one year on-site, a strong Oignon CUMA where we learned a lot about how collective action emerges and succeeds, a beautiful and enticing cooperative shop belonging to farmers, where we hardly resisted to eat everything, and where the coop members shared their life experience and how they became strongly rooted and prosperous.
The visits also included a big CUMA (coop of agricultural machinery), one of the 12.000 CUMA’s experiences, 12.000 examples for BOND of how people came around to collective action!
In this last visit Thierry, active member, said: “the CUMA is not the machinery you can see below, the CUMA is the 42 members who sit around this table and decide together what is best for all.”
The tour had 10 representatives: Nikolina from Croatia, Gazmend from Kosovo, Jacek and Katarzyna from Poland, Lilyana from Albania, Karolina and Arpad from Serbia, Andrei and Irina from Moldova, and Dan from Romania. In total 5 women and 5 men.
Christine and Louis, members of CUMA, facilitated and organised the tour fantastically, and in addition there were 4 interpreters: 1 for Polish, 2 for English, and 1 for Serbian who was also member of Serbian organisation and thus benefitted also herself from the visits. From the Coventry University side there was Alex Franklin and Angela Hilmi, and then Gaetano Naccarato the filmmaker who was able to capture pictures between the drops of a rainy north.
