Cooperatives and Food Security
FAO’s Perspective

The Gender Dimension

The world over, statistics show that women’s participation in cooperatives is low, especially in rural cooperatives. Cooperatives have tended to be synonymous with “men’s“ cooperatives. But the importance of agricultural cooperatives in village life, and their repercussions on food security through agricultural production, processing and marketing, as well as on family life and on women’s chores, is too great for the exclusion of women from the decision-making process to be accepted as inevitable.

Cooperative law often condones such discrimination by providing that the head of the family attends meetings: the fact that the wife is often de facto - or even de jure - head of the family is not always seen as enough reason for her to participate. When cooperative laws are revised, all provisions which make for gender discrimination should therefore be weeded out to avoid aggravating the problems faced by women in their attempts to be integrated into the participatory cooperative structures.

In addition, with greater freedom to decide on the types of business to conduct through a cooperative, the way is open for the development of activities of specific interest to women such as small cooperative mills, food storage and preservation, production of household necessities like soap and clothing, small animal raising and handicrafts. More stress should also be laid on cooperatives’ social function by organizing services which would relieve women from certain of their tasks: child care services or drudgery-reducing activities, or assist with organizing marriages and other ceremonies.

Cooperative Reconversion in Latin America

The greatest challenge facing cooperatives in Latin America is their “reconversion” from a quasi-trade-unionist role to an increasingly entrepreneurial role that more effectively meets cooperative members’ needs in the period of transition to market-oriented economies. FAO has initiated a programme to promote this process through strengthening the capacities of national cooperative confederations to assist their member cooperatives in the participatory identification and design of investment projects facilitating “reconversion”.

A special organizational unit for this purpose has been established in the Cofederación Intercooperativa Agropecuaria of Argentina which is already assisting Argentinean cooperatives and is expected to extend this assistance to other MERCOSUR countries. Similar units are being established within the Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA) of Honduras for the countries of Central America and within the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) of México.

Emerging Farmers’ Groups in Viet Nam

A survey conducted in the framework of a recent FAO technical assistance project in Viet Nam showed that many farm households form voluntary cooperative groups to provide support services to their members’. These small groups, with an average of 18 members, include:

Water users’ groups composed of farm households, which undertake joint management and maintenance of the irrigation system.

· Joint liability groups, formed in order to gain access to bank credit. The individual farm households very often have no collateral. Group members jointly guarantee repayments.
· Professional groups made up of farm households exercising the same profession: gardeners’ associations, shrimp rearing groups, sugar cane plantation groups, hybrid maize groups, etc. These self-help groups try out new technologies, share the results of their experiences, process and market the products together, strengthen their bargaining position with private traders while negotiating prices and quality standards, and assist in setting up and developing specialized production areas.
· Marketing groups bringing together input suppliers, producers and traders to ensure steady and timely delivery of produce, such as poultry, vegetables and dairy products. Groups have also been formed for off-farm activities such as tailoring.
· Production groups, voluntarily formed by members who contribute labour and capital. Examples are rice milling groups, tractor groups for land preparation, fishing groups, animal rearing groups, afforestation groups, shops for input supply, artisans and handicraft groups for repair work, marketing of agricultural products, etc. In general, these joint production groups operate as small-scale enterprises and play an important role in employment creation and income-generation for members.

Fertilizer Cooperatives

The Indian Farmers’ Fertilizer Cooperative Limited (IFFCO) was established in 1967, with the primary objective of increasing agricultural productivity and improving the rural economy by producing quality fertilizers and promoting the balanced use of these fertilizers. It is a multi-unit cooperative - a federation of approximately 30,000 societies from village to national level. IFFCO has also established 174 Farmers Service Centres where fertilizers, seed and agrochemicals are supplied under one roof and where farmers receive technical advice on the use of these agricultural inputs. The cooperative has far-reaching national linkages with farmers, researchers, extensionists, the private sector and government

Since 1992, IFFCO has launched an Integrated Plant Nutrition System (IPNS) programme in response to the identified need for more balanced nutrient application in Indian agriculture. The main objective of the programme is to improve soil fertility and productivity at farmers’ level in order to increase agricultural production and farmers’ income.

FAO has been involved with the IFFCO IPNS programme since its inception in 1992, regularly providing advice on various technical aspects of its activities. A joint workshop on IPNS was organized in September 1992 and in 1993 the cooperative launched a programme of trials and demonstrations to promote IPNS. FAO consultants have visited selected villages and established plant nutrient balance sheets for those villages. As a result of those balance sheets, FAO has been able to propose improved plant nutrient management techniques to farmers in those villages, thereby improving their productivity and fertilizer use efficiency and reducing nutrient losses to the environment.

In April 1996, FAO agreed with the Government of India to finance and provide technical backstopping to a Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP) entitled “Development of an Integrated Plant Nutrition System Methodology”. In September 1996 IFFCO organized a workshop for all its regional staff involved in balanced fertilization and the IPNS programme throughout the country, as well as university professors and experts from the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Fertilizer Association of India (FAI). In this workshop the results of the last six IPNS campaigns were discussed and plans for future activities were elaborated. The most significant of those future activities is an International IPNS workshop which is scheduled for November 1997, in which researchers involved in IPNS work from both the developed and developing world will meet to share their experiences in this area of work. Another important output of this TCP will be a publication entitled “A Guide for the Extension of IPNS in Asia and India: The Indian Experience”.