How to survive: Artificial quality food schemes and new forms of rule for farmers in direct marketing strategies

- Quality food schemes ascribe superiority to products, allowing producers to get premium prices or sell to exclusive markets.
- The entrepreneurial logics and the focus on quality for the benefits of urban customers bring new challenges to producers.
- · While the programs use a discourse of urban-rural reconnection, they embed top-down and unbalanced politics.
- The quality strategy seems imposed, and the created quality foods result artificial.
- Results call for a more nuanced perspective of the alternatives to the mainstream agri-food system.