Connection between community strategies and sustainable food consumption

Abstract

Sustainability is tightly linked to the conception of food sovereignty, which has become a central issue for the international social movements dealing with agriculture during the past decade. According to the philosophy of the movement farmers have the right to produce local food products, and the consumers have the right to decide what they want to consume, who they want it to be produced by and how they want it to be produced. In this system it is task of the state to protect the local farms from the huge amount of agricultural product and food import. In the presentation the authors put great emphasis on highlighting the possibility of forming consumer patriotism, on the direct sale of agricultural and food products with special regard to the traditional and regional food products. The Hungarian food producers are fighting a losing battle against the import products flooding into our country. The price competition on the market causes them increasing losses, while their production efficiency in unable to improve significantly neither in the short, nor in the midterm. A direct result of this is that the Hungarian food producers – through price competition – are unable to keep their target markets, so they are forced to use other marketing tools. One possibility is to make consumer patriotism stronger among Hungarian consumers. If we are able to show the consumers’ positive attitudes towards the Hungarian products, then the market strategy of the Hungarian food products can be supplemented with a new element. Another possibility for increasing the added value is to build the system of direct sale. An increasing number of producers realize in Western-Europe and in the United States that direct sale increases the profit significantly and also results in a certain level of independence from the processing industry and from trade. The farmers also know that there is a greater demand for reliable, healthy products with safe, origin, for which – in case of proper marketing influencing - they are willing to pay more. From the producers’ view direct sale leads to a change in attitude as well: instead of the previous production conception they consider the consumers’ demands too, they try to accommodate to them supplely. Keywords: food sovereignty, ethnocentrism, labelling, sustainability