Agricultural Cooperatives I: History, Theory and Problems

By G. Ortmann, Robert P. King. 2007

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper presents the principles of cooperation and briefly describes the history and development of agricultural cooperatives in developed and less-developed countries, with particular emphasis on South Africa. A new Cooperatives Act, based on international principles of cooperation, was promulgated in South Africa in August 2005. The theory of cooperatives, and new institutional economics theory (NIE) (including transaction cost economics, agency theory and property rights theory) and its applicability to the cooperative organizational form, are also presented, as are the inherent problems of conventional cooperatives, namely free-rider, horizon, portfolio, control and influence cost problems caused by vaguely defined property rights. An analysis of the future of cooperatives in general, based on a NIE approach, suggests a life cycle for cooperatives (formation, growth, reorganization or exit) as they adapt to a changing economic environment characterized by technological change, industrialization of agriculture and growing individualism.

Subfields: Accounting, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac348a11dd9acc37ecb4baf36d6260a1de0cb76d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Marijke D'Haese
2. S. Speelman
3. G. Mujawamariya

In Strategy and Management

1. Ruerd Ruben
2. Marijke D'Haese
3. S. Speelman
4. J. Manda
5. G. Mujawamariya
6. A. Alene
7. R. Muradian
8. M. Khonje

Citations in the corpus

• Does cooperative membership increase and accelerate agricultural technology adoption? Empirical evidence from Zambia (2020, background): “Cooperative membership tends to increase crop yields, household income, and household assets; and reduce transaction costs in accessing inputs and output markets (Abebaw and Haile, 2013; Ma and Abdulai, 2016; Mojo et al., 2017; Ortmann and King, 2007; Verhofstadt and Maertens, 2015).”
• Agricultural cooperatives II: Can they facilitate access of small-scale farmers in South Africa to input and product markets? (2007, background): “228 Proponents and potential leaders of cooperatives should also be aware of the weaknesses inherent in conventional cooperatives (Cook, 1995; Ortmann and King, 2007).”
• Cooperative membership and dairy performance among smallholders in Ethiopia (2016, background): “Despite their many potential advantages, cooperatives however are prone to face a number of important challenges, such as freeriding, corruption, principal-agent problems or different sorts of mismatches between the individual and collective interests (Ortmann and King, 2007).”
• The determinants and economic impacts of membership in coffee farmer cooperatives: recent evidence from rural Ethiopia (2017, background): “Following the arguments that cooperatives cannot implement all these principles, usually three principles: user-owned, user-controlled and user-benefiting principles are adopted by cooperatives as the basic ones (Ortmann and King, 2007).”
• Exploring double side-selling in cooperatives, case study of four coffee cooperatives in Rwanda (2013, background): “In South Africa, cooperatives were a policy instrumen in the support to white commercial farmers during the Apartheid regime (Ortmann and King, 2007). cratic aspects of cooperation.”