Download Free Agriculture Cooperatives Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Agriculture Cooperatives and write the review.

Agriculture is a major contributor to Africa's GDP, the region's biggest source of employment and its largest food producer. However, agricultural productivity remains low and buyer-driven global value chains offer few opportunities for small producers to upgrade into higher value-added activities. In recent years, the revival of Africa's cooperatives has been celebrated by governments and international donors as a pathway towards inclusive agricultural development, and this book explores the strengths but also the issues which surround these cooperatives. The book scrutinizes the neoliberal ideal of economic prosperity arising through the operation of liberalized labor markets by illuminating the discriminatory nature of Uganda's informal labor relations. It points to the role of cooperatives as a potential instrument of progressive change in African export agriculture, where large numbers of small producers depend on casual wage work in addition to farming. In contrast to the portrayal, advanced by some governments and rarely questioned by donors, of an unproblematic co-existence of small producers' collective action and big capital interests, the author calls for a re-politicized debate on the Social and Solidarity Economy. As part of this, she highlights the adverse political and economic conditions faced by African cooperatives, including intense international competition in agricultural processing, inadequate access to infrastructure and services, and at times antagonistic state-cooperative relations. Supported by wide-ranging interdisciplinary evidence, including new ethnographic, survey and interview data, this book shows how cooperatives may be co-opted by both the state and corporations in a discourse that ignores structural inequalities in value chains and emphasizes poverty reduction over economic and political empowerment. It provides a critique of New Institutional Economics as a framework for understanding how institutions shape redistribution, and develops a political economy approach to explore the conditions for structural change in African export agriculture.
The genesis of this book dates back a number of years to an annual meeting of the American Institute of Cooperation. Cooperative leaders at that meeting openly expressed their feelings that they would like a much stronger commitment on the part of our land grant universities in particular and other educational institutions in general to creating a greater understanding of cooperatives and their role in our economy. Since I was in agreement with this position, the course in general group action which I was teaching was changed to emphasize the role of agricultural cooperatives. The need for a textbook designed to help in this emphasis became apparent. This book is the culmination of an effort to meet that need. This book has been prepared with the student and instructor in mind. It is based upon experience gained from many years of interaction with students in a classroom setting, in discussions with them after class hours, and after they had finished their degree requirements and had taken positions in jndustry, government, or elsewhere. While objectives of the book have remained relatively unchanged over time, the sub stance and format as means of meeting those objectives have changed from time to time as a result of these contacts and discussions. The input xiv Preface xv of students over the years as reflected in this product is gratefully acknowledged.
Originally published in 1993, this is a study of agricultural co-operatives. The farming structure in transition countries has shifted from dominance of large corporate farms to family smallholdings. Smallholders everywhere experience difficulties with access to market services, including sale of products, purchase of inputs, and acquisition of machinery; they suffer from credit shortages and have limited access to information and advisory services. The barriers to market access prevent smallholders from fully exploiting their inherent productivity advantages. Best-practice world experience highlights farmers' service cooperatives, created by grassroots users, as the most effective way of improving the market access of small farmers. Service cooperatives also help smallholders overcome market failures, when private business entrepreneurs are unwilling to provide services in areas that they judge unprofitable or unfairly exploit users through monopolistic practices. These difficulties and market failures are prominent in transition countries and scholars accordingly expected rapid development of agricultural service cooperatives in response to smallholder needs. The present volume explores gaps between expectations and reality.