Can Cooperation Create a Better Future? | International Day of Cooperatives
Cooperatives are a global social movement. Since the founding of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, cooperatives have been around for 180 years, taking root the world over. In 1922, the International Cooperative Alliance designated the first Saturday in July as the “International Day of Cooperatives”. From 1995 onwards, the International Day of Cooperatives became an officially recognised occasion of the UN General Assembly, marking the centenary of the International Cooperative Alliance.
How much do you know about the history of cooperatives? How are they organised, how do they reconcile collective purpose with commercial viability, and how do they forge new connections between producers and consumers?
Foodthink’s past articles have explored cooperative practices in food and agriculture around the world. These “stones from other mountains” may help you find paths towards health, fairness and sustainability within the vast “food empire”.
I. What Is a Cooperative?
How Can We Classify Types of Cooperatives?
Broadly, cooperatives can be classified by membership criteria — that is, by who collectively owns the enterprise — into worker cooperatives, community cooperatives and consumer cooperatives. Cooperatives can take root in every industry.
How Can We Distinguish Genuine Cooperatives from Fakes?
This depends on the relationship between the cooperative and its members — whether members jointly invest, use and participate. If the majority merely contribute capital without taking part in the cooperative’s operations, it easily becomes an “empty shell” controlled by a handful of people.
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Cooperatives in fact pursue both public-benefit and commercial objectives, sitting between non-profit entities (associations, foundations, social enterprises) and for-profit entities (companies). Unlike non-profits, the surpluses cooperatives generate are essential to their own operation and members’ welfare, but their decision-making differs from that of companies: decisions are made on a one member, one vote basis, and surpluses are distributed more equitably.
II. Consumer Cooperatives
The history of consumer cooperatives in the 19th and 20th centuries reveals the close ties between the cooperative movement, the trade union movement and the socialist movement. The original aim of early consumer cooperatives was to help poor workers escape the grip of capital and obtain affordable, quality everyday goods.
The cooperative movement has weathered turbulent political storms. In Nazi Germany, how did the cooperative movement — once hailed as the “third pillar of the labour movement” — suffer near-total destruction? In Japan under the New Security Legislation, how did cooperatives become an anti-capitalist alternative amid the ebb of traditional labour movements?
In a consumer cooperative, members should not simply assume the role of consumers buying goods and enjoying services; they should become participants or “life-makers”.
Furthermore, if food movements merely pursue alternative market options without addressing food justice, they risk becoming nothing more than a middle-class pastime for urbanites. From the “jade from other mountains” in Britain, Germany and Japan to China in the new millennium — in Chengdu, Beijing and Taiwan — how are the rising consumer cooperatives meeting and reflecting on these challenges?
III. Farmers’ Cooperatives
How smallholders can be organically integrated into modern agricultural development is a central concern of the agrarian question. Against the backdrop of increasing marginalisation of smallholders, farmers’ specialised cooperatives provide services across production, processing and marketing for individual producers, helping to overcome smallholders’ disadvantages in areas such as technology and capital and serving as their organisational foundation.
The well-known work Peasant Life in China traces its origins to the Silk Improvement Cooperative that Fei Dasheng, sister of Fei Xiaotong, spearheaded in their hometown in 1924. A century on, how has the situation of farmers’ cooperatives changed? To what extent has modern agricultural technology facilitated cooperation among farmers, and to what extent has it raised the barriers for smallholders competing against large capital?
Issues of technology and capital are closely bound up with the scale of industry, and scaling up implies both quantitative and qualitative change. Expanding operations not only requires additional factors of production but also complicates relations of production and social relations — through, for example, division of labour and employment relationships — followed by differentiation in socio-economic status. Yet the value of the cooperative economy lies not merely in boosting output and income, but in its potential to reshape relations of production.
This potential is rooted in the dual nature of cooperatives as both economic and social organisations, and the relationship between a cooperative and its members accordingly oscillates between an interest-based tie and a communal bond. Without returns, the public character cannot be sustained; yet purely economic relations can also drive cooperatives towards disintegration within the illusion of the “free market”. So how can this fragile balance between the two be maintained in an unfavourable market environment?
“Getting into” rural development inevitably means weathering the gap between ideals and reality. Comparing then and now, what old and new challenges does rural reconstruction work face, and can the goals of cooperative economics be better realised? Several seasoned practitioners candidly shared their practices and reflections with Foodthink.
In the field of rural development, “taking villagers as the primary actors” seems self-evident. Yet when we turn our attention to farmers’ own livelihood needs, many questions remain: amid an increasingly differentiated rural population, whose needs are we truly addressing? How do a village’s social relations shape the realisation of livelihood needs? To what extent are these needs genuinely autonomous, and to what extent shaped by markets and capital?
Ecological agriculture may appear to defy economic rationality. From what standpoint, then, do social organisations champion ecological agriculture? What considerations lead farmers to opt for ecological or conventional methods? How can the latent tension between livelihoods and ecology be reconciled, and how can conflicts between ecological and conventional growers be handled?
Yet towards the vision of a community founded on equality, mutual aid and sharing, these experiments in cooperative economics will ultimately reveal their far-reaching significance. As this year’s International Day of Cooperatives arrives, Foodthink wishes you abundant harvests from cooperation!
Editor: Anael