New Policy For Development Of New Type Of Cooperatives

"Cooperatives are key components to implement policy of restructuring agricultural sector and build a new countryside", said Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat at the conference on 3-year implementation of the Cooperative Law held on 2^nd March in Ha Noi.

Until 2015, the country has 19 unions of agricultural cooperatives, about 11 thousand cooperatives working in the fields of farming, animal husbandry, fisheries, irrigation, forestry, salt production and agricultural services. Most of cooperatives are implementing integrated businesses while the number of specialized cooperatives is quite a few. Of the 7 million 300 thousand cooperative members, there are nearly 6 million 700 thousand households and individuals are members of agricultural cooperatives.

There are only about 30% of agricultural cooperatives operating under the Cooperative Law

Most of opinions indicated that, although a small number of cooperatives have had innovation in mode of operation, application of technical advances in production and implementation business association; however, there are still cooperatives that are not following the law and confused in making the switch.

Until now, there are only about 30% of agricultural cooperatives operating under the Cooperative Law, so the mode of operation still does not change much and they still remain serious thinking about administrative, subsidization which was existed in the mode of old-style cooperatives.

There were some views said that the current cooperatives only focus on input services for agricultural production. Storage services, processing and marketing of products have not been concerned, so the operational efficiency has still been low. In addition, the lack of resources, especially financial resources to develop cooperatives, cooperative groups is also a major obstacle in the development of new types of cooperatives.

The delegates proposed, along with continuing to improve legal basis and policies that support the development of cooperatives, cooperative groups, linking production to consumption of agricultural products for farmers, there are still needs to detect typical cooperatives in each specialized fields  to set them as models to build and replicate. In particular, we should construct models of joint production and consumption of Vietnam’s famous agricultural products in international market such as rice, tea, coffee, cashew, pepper, milk, seafood... thereby empower the position of current agricultural cooperatives.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat stated: Reorganization of production is one of the pillars in the implementation of agricultural restructuring, in which cooperatives are indispensable. Therefore, the basic goals that we look towards to are having more and more effective cooperatives.

We need to work together on specific definitions of agricultural cooperation in terms of content, rights and responsibilities of cooperative members. He suggested from local practices that cooperatives should make recommendations to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Union of cooperatives and local authorities to implement effectively in practice.

Hung Nguyen

Source: OMARD