Social justice in the market place: the renewal of peri-urban open-air food markets around Montpellier, France
Résumé
Farmers' markets are recognized as places of community building (Brown, 2002; Renting et al., 2003). Numerous scholars have described direct sales as a means of developing solidarity between farmers and consumers and addressing the growing disconnect between production and consumption of food in urban systems (Morgan et al., 2006). Localizing the food system is not an end in and of itself (Born and Purcell, 2006), but geographic and organizational proximity can meet the rising demand of city dwellers to know where and how their food is produced who has produced it. Promoting farmers' markets can thus be a way to sustain peri-urban agriculture and to reconnect producers and consumers. However, this producer/consumer relationship has often been idealized (Le Velly and Dubuisson-Quellier, 2008), leading scholars to question the actual impact of farmers' markets or other short food supply chains on social justice (Alkon, 2008; Mundler, 2013). "Farmers' markets may not provide farmers or their workers living wages, and farmers' markets may be less accessible, for a variety of economic and cultural reasons, to some communities" (Horst, 2017).