Cooperatives: issues and trends in developing countries

Abstract

Agricultural cooperatives have been an important way for farmers to organise themselves. The agricultural community has usually been characterised as geographically scattered, which, in turn, results in the community being disorganised, lacking negotiation power in the market, and lacking a voice in society. Various types of agricultural cooperatives, when properly used and organised, can help the agricultural community to avoid or reduce the above weaknesses.

In China, as in many other countries, agricultural cooperatives have been used as a way of organising farmers. They were strongly favoured in the mid 1950s and this led to the establishment of tens of thousands of agricultural cooperatives across the country by 1957. Areas of cooperation were chiefly in agricultural production but also in rural supply and marketing, and agricultural credit. This massive movement of agricultural cooperatives soon evolved into the people’s commune movement. As a result, agricultural production cooperatives were soon replaced by agricultural collective farming in the form of ‘production teams’ at the grass roots level, ‘production brigades’ in the middle, and ‘people’s communes’as the highest level of rural administrative organisation.