På Landsbygdsnätverkets nätverksmorgon den 30 oktober 2024 gästades vi av forskaren Jonathan Dolley. Han berättade om Hansalim-modellen, ett livsmedelssystem med en stark filosofisk grund som har sitt ursprung i Sydkorea. Idag är Hansalim ett nationellt, samarbetsbaserat livsmedelssystem som omfattar över 900 000 hushåll. Vi bad honom skriva ett blogginlägg om ämnet och vi fick det första kapitlet till hans kommande bok. Ni kan läsa det på engelska här nedan – varsågoda!
Living Together: Hansalim as a solidarity-based sustainable food system
Jonathan Dolley, 2024.11.12, Visiting Researcher at Mosim and Salim Research Institute
Introduction
Imagine a food system which belongs entirely to the people growing, processing and consuming its products and which is designed not for profit but for permanence. Perhaps instead of maximizing profits for shareholders its goal would be to build lasting relationships of trust and mutual care between rural and urban communities based on a shared responsibility for the future. Food would no longer be a commodity; the price of which is set by the ‘hidden hand’ of the market. It could perhaps become a symbol of mutual dependence, valued for the labour required to produce it while caring for the lifeworlds of the nonhumans whose continuing flourishing is the ultimate source of our own survival. Is such a system possible? Has it ever been attempted in a modern industrialised country? If so, how?
In Seoul and many other cities all across South Korea there are shops with the name ‘Hansalim’ on their facades, 240 of them in total. They are run by democratic communities of local consumers and in these shops you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, meat, rice and other grains. They also sell kimchi, oils and soy sauce and everything necessary for cooking in addition to a multitude of other preserved and processed foods from snacks to teas and herbal medicines. Alongside food items you can also purchase eco-friendly soaps and cosmetics and simple clothing and cooking utensils among a range of other household items. All of these products are made without artificial additives and through organic and eco-friendly methods by self-organised rural communities who adhere to an agreed set of standards on quality, safety and ecological protection. With a few exceptions, all are produced in Korea and sold at annually fixed prices agreed in advance by producers and consumers to ensure a fair and stable income for farmers.
The consumer and producer communities responsible for this experiment in economic democracy set up the first store in 1986 and published a Manifesto in 1989 which described their goal as the transformation of society from a civilization of killing to a civilization of life in which we learn to live together with one another and with the non-human world in symbiotic relationships of mutual care. Nearly 40 years on, Hansalim has become a national multistakeholder federation of consumer and producer cooperatives with over 900,000 member households which not only operates a comprehensive alternative food system but also funds a whole range of other activities to promote the Hansalim Life Movement as a grassroots democratic project for societal and cultural change through education, publishing, research, environmental campaigning, charitable aid and peer-to-peer financing.
Where did the idea for Hansalim come from? What is it today and how does it work? And what might we in Europe learn from Hansalim’s experience as we try to transform our own food systems? I have spent the past 4 years investigating Hansalim with these questions in mind in order to a write a book for practitioners, researchers and policy-makers who are looking for fresh perspectives on food system transformation from beyond their own contexts. In this short article I will give you a preview of what I have discovered (this is a shortened version of the first chapter of my book which is available to read online: book.livingtogether.xyz).
What is Hansalim?
The word ”Hansalim” is often used by members as a verb. ”Let’s Hansalim!” is their rallying cry. So the first thing to understand about Hansalim is that it is not simply an organisation, neither is it an ideology, or an identity. It is an action and it is a promise.
For urban consumers it is the action of taking responsibility for the livelihoods of rural producers. This is achieved by ensuring that producers are released as much as possible from the unpredictability of the markets. Consumers bind themselves to the promise of purchasing fixed quantities at fixed prices which are agreed ahead of time through the mutual agreement or producers and consumers as equal partners.
For rural producers Hansalim is the action of taking responsibility for the life of consumers whose health and wellbeing are dependent upon the quality and safety of the food that nourishes them. This is achieved by cultivating crops, processing foods and developing new products with the needs of the consumer taking priority over the drive for profit. Producers bind themselves to the promise of providing trustworthy goods which give life rather than exploiting the body’s involuntary responses to sugar and salt.
But Hansalim is not just about a relationship of mutual care through direct sales between producers and consumers. The literal meaning of ”Hansalim” is to nurture all things or to bring all things to life together. And so the community of producers and consumers in Hansalim take on a wider shared responsibility of care for their neighbours and for the wider world. Although it begins with the very practical relationships between producers and consumers, Hansalim is also the action of nurturing symbiotic relationships between rural and urban communities, between humanity and the nonhuman world, between the self and others and between ones spirit and the Spirit in all things.
So I consider Hansalim to be not just a straight forward multistakeholder cooperative but also a dynamic combination of a peace movement, a practical eco-philosophy and a counter-cultural alternative economy based on cooperation and mutual care. How then, did this remarkable community come to be formed?
Where did Hansalim come from?
In 1986 pro-democracy protesters were out in the streets fighting with police and trying to escape tear gas. Since seizing power in a military coup in 1961, General Park Chung-hee presided over 18 years of military rule. Following his assassination in 1979 and another coup, General Chun Doo-hwan installed himself as president, leading what was essentially a continuation of the military regime in the face of growing mass protests calling for democratic government.
In the midst of such turmoil, a small group of farmers and activists opened a small rice store in the centre of Seoul. In light of the chaotic political situation, this was seen by their fellow pro-democracy activists as a betrayal. However, the creation of that first store, called Hansalim Nongsan, was actually a radical act of resistance and hope in the face of political uncertainty. The men and women who opened Hansalim Nongsan belonged to a cooperative of producers and consumers in a city called Wonju, about an hour away from Seoul, and that store represented a first step in launching an ecological alternative movement that had been gathering support in Wonju and beyond since the late 1970s. It’s founders where known as the Wonju Group.
The Wonju Group were a diverse collection of Catholic Farmers, urban housewives, pro-democracy activists, artists, poets and academics who had been involved in the credit union movement in Wonju that was founded in the 1960s. They had witnessed the fundamentally destructive tendencies of capitalist and socialist industrialisation and they were looking for an alternative in the cooperative movement. However, they recognised that cooperatives were also vulnerable to the same fundamental mistake that lay at the heart of industrial civilisation. That mistake was to assume a materialist, mechanistic view of the world which viewed humans and all life as replaceable parts in the machine of economic growth. It was this worldview, they argued, that gave rise to the characteristics of domination, alienation, separation and oppression in modern society.
As an alternative, they proposed a worldview founded on the sacredness and interconnectedness of all life. The first version of this worldview or eco-philosophy was outlined in the Wonju Report in 1982. As the movement began to grow the Wonju Group set up the first Life Cooperative in Wonju in 1985 and the Hansalim Nongsan rice store a year later. In this way, the Wonju Coop formally brought together organic farming and direct trade with the equal participation of consumers and producers. Soon after, the Hansalim Community Consumers Union was set-up in Seoul with 70 members to trade directly with the Hansalim Producers Association that was set up with 70 farming households. Next, the Wonju Group hosted a year long process of study and discussion to develop the Hansalim Manifesto which was published in 1989 and which formally launched the Hansalim Life Movement.
From this small beginning, the movement quickly expanded as other cooperatives and farming communities joined from across the country and consumer membership grew. By 1990 there were four Life Coops with over 5,500 members and within just over another 10 years membership had grown to over 40,000. That is when things really began to take off and by 2008 there were 19 Life Coops managing 84 stores for their 170,000 members. In 2023 Hansalim’s 27 Life Coops and 15 Producer Federations handled annual sales of 485,066 million KRW (324.3 million euros) through 240 stores, an online store and a mobile app. From these sales, 330,610 million KRW (221 million euros) were returned to the 136 producer communities. That is nearly 70%! So what kind of business model has Hansalim created that provides those returns to producers while covering the shared business operations and funding a whole range of movement activities from the remaining 30%?
How does it work?
In simple terms, the Hansalim business model can be described as a contract-based direct sales arrangement in which prices and quantities are agreed annually in advance by producers and consumers with support from Hansalim’s employees. However, it is also very flexible in ways that are designed to support the needs of producers.
A system designed for producers
There are four key features of Hansalim’s business model. Firstly: flexibility of production. Hansalim’s production system allows for a relatively wide range of production philosophies and techniques among member producers to ensure that producers have maximum autonomy. For example, one producer community might prefer a relatively simple style of organic farming with a small number of crops while another aspires to build a complex system of circulating agriculture with a large diversity of crops and livestock supported by recycling of farm wastes from one part of the system as inputs to others. Still others, especially fruit producers, might find it impossible to grow without a limited use of home made natural pesticides. A dogmatic insistence on a single farming philosophy would exclude many farmers who might be unable to follow a one-size-fits-all system in the face of local conditions or other resource constraints. Hansalim’s more flexible approach removes a significant barrier to entry for farmers who would otherwise need to spend a long time learning new techniques before starting to earn an income. This brings the added advantage that farmers who want to transition from conventional to organic farming can do so in a staged process while still making a living. However, it also creates a problem. How to maintain the trust of consumers when the diversity of production techniques is so wide?
This brings us to the second feature of Hansalim’s business model: simple honest labeling. Transparency with consumer members is ensured through Hansalim’s own labelling system. Products are labelled under four main categories:
- Organic (which would include conventional organic, permaculture and EM techniques);
- Pesticide-free (when crop types and local conditions make it non-viable to exclude use of fertilizers);
- Low pesticide (for certain fruit crops which would be prohibitively difficult to grow without a limited use of pesticides);
- Domestic (for miscellaneous grains such as barley or black bean which are used as raw ingredients in some processed goods and feed for livestock).
For all four categories Hansalim’s standards are stricter than the national safety standards and products are tested regularly for residues, contaminants and radiation as appropriate to protect trust between consumers and producers.
To complement the flexibility and transparency of production methods the third feature -flexibility of supply – enhances the autonomy of producers and provides some added resilience to the system. Hansalim producers are not locked-in to exclusive supply contracts but have the freedom to supply whatever proportion of their crop to Hansalim they wish while simultaneously supplying through other channels such as government purchasing schemes for school meals. This applies to each producer community and also to each member of each community. So one farmer might supply 30% of their produce to Hansalim through their community while selling the rest through local government procurement for school meals. Or a producer community might sell Hansalim branded grapes through the Hansalim Federation while selling grape juice through another market under their own brand.
Finally, for an additional level of flexibility, the contract-based system is supplemented by demand-based supply arrangements to allow greater flexibility for producers.
Taken together, these four features of Hansalim’s business model mean that, within and between producer communities the level of specialization or circular integration and the combination of sales channels are all decided by the producers themselves. This makes for an astonishingly diverse range of production operations each tailored to the local soil and climate conditions and preferences of producers themselves, while ensuring a stable guaranteed income to as many farmers as possible.
As I mentioned above, until recently, with margins well below 30%, Hansalim was able to return 73% or more of the product price to the producers. Now, following several years of rising costs and worsening impacts of climate change the margin has come under increasing pressure and currently stands at just over 31% which leaves almost 69% for producers.
That is virtually the reverse of conventional market distribution which usually takes a 50 – 70% margin.
This is achieved through a combination of: 1) recovered costs from distribution by removing the multiple opportunities from profit gauging by intermediaries; 2) prices set to reflect the true costs of production; and 3) economies of scope and scale achieved through shared business activities and collectively owned capital at local, regional and national levels. So what does the margin pay for?
A different kind of consumer experience
The largest portion (21.7%) goes to the Life Coops themselves to cover the costs of running stores, handling local distribution and their various educational, participation and engagement activities. Life Coops are autonomous member owned businesses which run the Hansalim stores in their local areas. They decide when and where to open new stores, how to manage them and how to organise local distribution options such as home delivery. Stores are usually run by an employed manager and the Life Coop’s Store Activists (consumer members who are trained and paid to staff the stores) and products are ordered through the Hansalim Business Federation and delivered from their national logistics centre.
In a Hansalim store you can buy virtually everything you need from food to household goods and even cosmetics. Almost all these products are made by Hansalim producers and processors with a few exceptions for some household items and a handful of fair trade products. Hansalim branded sales through the business federation are supplemented by local goods sourced by each store according to the decision of each Life Coop. What this means is that there is usually just one type of everything you need rather than multiple brands of the same product so the shop size is relatively small compared to a regular supermarket
These stores also differ from a conventional supermarket in another way. They often provide the venue for member activities and encounters between consumers and producers facilitated by the Life Coop’s Organising Activists (members who are trained and paid to organise opportunities for consumers and producers to meet each other and share food and other activities together). From the beginning of Hansalim, relationship building among consumers and between consumers and producers has been a top priority.
There are various ways consumers can build community together and participate in the livelihoods of producers which are supported with specific budgets held by the Life Coops and the Hansalim Federation. Neighbourhood meetings and small groups provide a context for consumer members to learn and build relationships through reading groups, cooking classes, social activities, and environmental activism etc. Helping hands visits are organised by Activists to bring members to help producers with farming activities such as planting, weeding and harvest and to join in with traditional rural rituals and share meals together. Community work is also an important shared activity in which members and producers raise money for charitable causes, donate food to people in need and provide education and support to marginalized groups. Consumers often visit the producer communities for local festivals or just to see the farm, share a meal and get to know each other. Producers also visit stores to introduce their new products and many develop close relationships with particular Life Coops.
In addition to selling to members and organising member activities, Life Coops also engage with the wider community by running a whole range of educational activities and training, community kitchens, environmental campaigns and community building activities and some have also set up new cooperatives in solar power and in the care sector.
On top of all these activities, the high point of Hansalim’s cultural life are the festivals which are held at national and local levels. For example, the Autumn festivals bring producers and consumers together for food, drinking and traditional games and dancing. They provide a special context for making friends and creating a sense of shared identity and camaraderie. And there is one group of Hansalim people without whom none of this would be possible, the practitioners.
The special role of practitioners
In Hansalim, employees are referred to as ’practitioners.’ They are the people who make it possible to put the producer-consumer relationship into practice by running the businesses, coordinating movement activities and organising the many processes that are required to keep each member organisation running and working together as a federation. They are not only professionals in logistics, marketing, strategy etc. but they also act as mediators between consumer and producer members and their organisations. Whereas a manager in a corporate enterprise might be able to focus solely on negotiating financial dealings with clients and suppliers, Hansalim practitioners often find themselves also negotiating the complex conflicts in values and expectations between Hansalim members, making their role especially difficult and important.
The largest employer of practitioners within Hansalim is the Business Federation which takes the next largest share of revenue after the Life Coops (8.86%) to cover the costs of labour, logistics, promotion and marketing, product development etc. Finally, the smallest share of the margin (0.81%) is used to fund the Hansalim Federation which organises the national-level governance and policy-making processes, supports Hansalim’s educational, cultural, publishing, research and coordinates collaboration and solidarity activities with others in Korea and and especially small-scale farmers abroad, and provides support to the member Life Coops.
In 2023 there were a total of 291 practitioners working in the member Life Coops, a further 235 working for the Business Federation and 40 at the Hansalim Federation. These were supplemented by 1,396 Activists working in the stores and to organise member activities. Together with the 3,579 producers and processors they generate enough revenue to support themselves and the broader collective efforts of the Hansalim Life Movement to bring about social and cultural change towards a more sustainable way of living.
Conclusion
For those in Europe and other regions of the world outside Korea, Hansalim can appear to be a uniquely Korean phenomenon. ”Surely, it is only the collectivist culture of Korea that makes such a community possible. It could never succeed in our hyper-individualist western societies.” But you mustn’t forget that the two strongest influences on contemporary Korean culture are Confucianism and American consumerism. The former provided the rationale for a strictly hierarchical and patriarchal culture that dominated Korean society for several hundred years before the latter collided head on with it during the post-war period, giving rise to a uniquely oppressive mixture of competitive consumerism and rigid conformism.
It was in this context that Hansalim emerged as a concrete expression of the desire felt among many at the time for a different kind of society built upon equality, mutual respect and care for other humans and the nonhuman world. I have a feeling that this same desire has not gone away, but only deepened, not only among Koreans but equally among contemporary people in Europe and beyond. Clearly, it is not possible to simply transplant Hansalim’s model to other countries. It has its own history and unique context from which it emerged and it is not a static model but an evolving community in a continual process of change. But what is perhaps much more useful than a blueprint, is Hansalim’s story and the myriad stories of the people who practice Hansalim as a verb. These stories carry the values of Hansalim, the spirit and emotion of Hansalim people and the experience of countless challenges and success that they faced along the way. These stories, more than anything else, carry the seeds that could produce new fruit in other contexts, as long as there are those with the determination to cultivate them.
To hear these stories, I am afraid you will have to wait a little longer for the rest of the book to be written and published. I’ll do my best to finish it as soon as possible! You can keep up to date with my progress on my project website: www.livingtogether.xyz
Jonathan Dolley, Visiting Researcher at Mosim and Salim Research Institute
