Abstract:
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA hereafter) is a new agricultural production and sales model. In CSA model, agricultural producers and consumers are in a partnership. Consumers pay for the cost of agricultural production in advance or participate in the agricultural production. The peasants ensure providing safe agricultural products to consumers regularly, forming a relationship of sharing profits and losses. CSA promotes organic production and mutual cooperation which have good economic, ecological and social benefits. Our country is experiencing a rapid development of urbanization at present. Many issues have attracted widespread social attention like the imbalance between urban and rural areas caused by urban-rural dual structure; the decrease of planting land, ecological damage, and peasants' lost land caused by urban expansion; food safety, the reduction of small peasantry's production and living space caused by industrial production. How to solve the issues of agriculture, peasants and rural areas with the rapid development of urbanization, in order to realize the integration and sustainability of urban-rural development simultaneously? CSA model may be a useful resolution for this issue. The present paper consists of three parts: CSA concept, the current issues in China's urban and rural development, and the role of CSA model in the urban and rural development.