  We suppose that overall strangeness production in both high energy elementary
and heavy ion collisions can be described within the framework of an
equilibrium statistical model in which the effective degrees of freedom are
constituent quarks as used in effective lagrangian models. In this picture, the
excess of relative strangeness production in heavy ion collisions with respect
to elementary particle collisions arises from the unbalance between initial
non-strange matter and antimatter and from the exact colour and flavour quantum
number conservation over different finite volumes. The comparison with the data
and the possible sources of model dependence are discussed.
