LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Many of the newer co-ops enjoy legal protection and even European Union funds, but a new kind of informal consumer cooperatives has emerging over the past few years. The people who run the co-ops today are more likely to be created middle-class people interested in healthy food, as well as being a part of a community of peers.

"Co-operatives always appear when they are needed," Torsten Lorenz says, a historian studying the European cooperative movement at Charles University in Prague. "The English Rochdale co-operative, considered the starting point of the whole movement, appeared in the mid 19th century because people were starving and they found that cooperation helped them weather hard times. Nowadays it is often young environmentalists and leftists in pursuit of an alternative vision of society who start co-ops."

"There are different reasons why people joined our cooperative," Piotr Trzaskowski, one of the members of Warsaw Food Co-op says. Trzaskowski's co-op was created two years ago in the Polish capital. What attracts him among other reasons is "getting clean, ethical food at lower prices than in organic shops, and supporting local farmers."

The Warsaw co-op organizes shopping sessions every two weeks in a squat in the center of the city. About 60 people make up the broad co-op network of consumers, with 20 taking part in each shopping round. The group buys from two ecological farms as well as from a large food deposit in the city.

"What we have in place is definitely a consumer-friendly system," Trzaskowski explains. "It could be good to move towards a system where the focus is on support for the farmers but this would require a change in our philosophy which we are not envisaging yet and which also would be revolutionary in Polish society, even for the farmers themselves."

Another similar co-op already functions in Warsaw and two more in cities Lublin and Lodz. Even more co-ops are in the process of taking shape around the country.

Consumer supported agriculture, or CSA is an idea that is catching on. Under this program, farmers receive payments at the beginning of the season for the entire period and consumers pledge to take up all the products farmed in this period, thus sharing the risks with producers.

"I am primarily interested in promoting sustainable ways of farming because they are environmentally friendly," Jan Vale¨ka from the organization Biospotrebitel says. "CSAs represent new ways of getting people involved in farming, of linking consumers directly with farmers, of getting them in touch to the passing of seasons.

"People joining CSAs are fed up with supermarket food," he continues. "We want to know the farmers and understand how the food is produced; we're not so much interested in food formally labeled as organic, more in local food." 

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