Yoshida, Yoshiaki

A large number of community currencies have been born all over the world in the last decade. In the case of agricultural trading, community currencies work as a good tool of communication between participants in rural areas and cities. In this paper, we define the functions of Community Currencies by following their historical development, and consider feasibility that it can support community supported agriculture. The main findings were as follows. 1) In many case, community currencies create new civil communities including farmers and consumers. 2) community currencies enhance the autonomous nature of community and its self-determination for alternative paths of regional development. Farmers can exchange their products in need for voluntary services with participants in a new civil network. 3) The established rule of community currencies is that the evaluation of products and services in terms of working hours based on equality of labor, which is deferent from the valuation in the market. As a consequence, the growth of community currencies support environment-friendly farming of lower labor productivity than ordinary one.