An observation over the rural-urban re-connecting process based on the Alternative Food Network (AFN) in China——from the perspective of ‘social capital’

Abstract

Rebuilding and intensifying the rural-urban connections is a vital pathway to reverse the rural decline tendency as the permanent exodus of young people and induced rural-urban disconnections seriously challenge the sustainable rural development across the world. Combining the umbrella concept of Alternative Food Network (AFN) centering on directly connecting farmers and local consumers and ‘social capital’ closely linked to ‘trust’, ‘shared value’ and ‘social network’, this study develops a transdisciplinary framework to understand the process of an AFN-type agricultural practice case in eastern China, and examines its impact on re-linking local rural community to surrounding cities and fostering rural endogenous development capacity. Tracing the practice of an AFN-type ecological agri-food supply chain suggests that it not only contributes to meeting city affluent groups' increasingly demand of ecological agri-food, but also helps bridge the decline rural and booming urban areas, facilitate people-to-people exchange and knowledge and capital flow between two sides, and develop the collective actions involving both rural and urban individuals for further local agricultural innovations. We argue that as the top-level director, the extensionist-style external actors with rich 'social capital' play a central role in shaping the initial trust among the various individuals and forming collective actions for exercising AFN-type ecological agri-food supply chain, especially in the context of agri-food “trust crisis” in China, and that the agri-food supply chain practice could enable the isolated rural community to participate in urban economic circulation systems, and to improve rural talent structure by combining emerging knowledge and techniques to strengthen the ability in adapting to external changes. However, how to succeed in addressing negative ‘trust crisis’, scaling up and self-sustaining in the long term is the urgent challenge that the AFN-type agri-food chain needs to tackle immediately. Encouraging local farmers to enrich their own ‘social capital’ and manage complex changes might be an effective route for reinforcing the resilience in terms of rural vitalization and rural-urban integrated development.