"Agricultural cooperatives: headache or salvation"

The round table of the Association "People's Farmer" is devoted to the development of agricultural consumer cooperation. It was held in the Public Chamber of Russia with the support of the Russian Agricultural Bank.

The leaders of agricultural cooperatives in the regions, representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, RSO Agrocontrol, heads of farmer associations and individual agricultural producers took part in the event.

Traditionally, in a cooperative, farmers pool their resources to carry out joint agricultural activities. The members of the cooperative jointly solve the issues of cultivating land, operating and repairing agricultural machinery, harvesting animal feed together, finding sales markets, and promoting farm products.
- Today we want to listen to the problems and difficulties that arise in the work of consumer agricultural cooperatives and in their creation. Understand why it doesn’t work, what the organizers of cooperatives stumble on and be happy for those who work successfully. I propose to call our conversation “mistakes of the survivors,” Oleg Sirota, chairman of the agro-industrial complex commission of the Civic Chamber of Russia, chairman of the People’s Farmer Association, began the meeting.

The Ministry of Agriculture of Russia has developed measures to support agricultural cooperatives, grants are issued for their creation and development.
- State support measures for agricultural cooperatives are very popular. For six years, about 1,000 projects have been supported in Russia. More than 16 billion rubles have been issued as state support. Some of the cooperatives have grown from small ones into large forms of management. There are cooperatives with up to 2.5 thousand people, - said the representative of the Ministry of Agriculture of Russia Margarita Aleksandrova.

Andrey Morozov, President of RSO Agrocontrol, recalled the role of small farms in the countryside. “The co-op is just a technology that works through economies of scale,” he said. - The role of the cooperative is to ensure food security, employment and self-employment of the rural population, maintaining the population of rural areas. According to Morozov, experts see two ways to develop cooperatives: demonstration ones that will show their successful experience in doing business, processing and marketing products, mechanisms of internal interaction and are ready to transfer it to colleagues and cooperatives created to provide services to agricultural producers.

Farmers have the opportunity to sell products not only from the yard, at mini markets and their outlets. Now they can go to large chain stores. “So, in seven regions of Russia, we helped 99 suppliers of agricultural products organize “farm islands” in the Pyaterochka chain of stores, gave them the opportunity to trade directly with good customer traffic,” said Elena Dubinchuk, Head of the Directorate for the Development of Cooperative Chains of SMEs of Corporation JSC "SME". – Two such new “farm islands” opened in Crimea this week.

In the Russian regions, agricultural cooperation develops in different ways. It depends on the security of the farms, the volume of products, the possibilities of its marketing and promotion, even the mentality of the people, farmers say.

Thus, Igor Domnin, a representative of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, calls cooperation a salvation for disparate agricultural producers. - Limited resources and joint work - the main value on which we have relied, - he said. - The Association of Agricultural Producers, Processors and Trade of the Krasnoyarsk Territory "Yenisei Standard" has become an expert platform for the regional Ministry of Agriculture. We have adopted a separate regional sales and promotional support law.

In turn, Konstantin Tereshchenko, head of the Competence Center for Agricultural Cooperation and Support for Farmers in the Novosibirsk Region, said that in 2021 only 4 new cooperatives were registered in the region. Of the 41 operating cooperatives, only 8 are profitable. The issue of people's trust in each other within the association is still acute. He noted that in the region cooperation works at the level of contractual relations between peasant farms. - Neighbors-farmers exchange equipment, fuel, feed from each other for the future harvest. The sale of products is also secured by contractual relations - this is a working mechanism for the relationship of farmers. We see only the development of grant support as a motivation tool for creating a cooperative as a legal entity, - said Tereshchenko.

The competition of cooperatives with agricultural holdings and large agricultural enterprises, the complexity of lending, including in terms of subsidiary liability of each member of the cooperative, the unwillingness of participants to take responsibility and the annual distribution of profits, the lack of special taxation for cooperation, as well as the lack of transparency of local markets, was noted by the chairman of the agricultural cooperative "Vozrozhdeniye Novosibirsk region Arsen Voskanyan.

Executive Director of the Association "Agrarian Entrepreneurship of the Perm Territory" Igor Zapevalov recalled the need to distinguish cooperation from pseudo-cooperation, the main economic component for each member of the cooperative. He proposed organizing training courses for professional managers of agricultural cooperatives.
Yusuf Ismailov, a farmer from the Kirov region, pointed out the problem of expensive transportation of small ruminants to the place of slaughter and the cost of testing animals for various diseases is unbearable for small farmers.

At the end of the round table, farmers expressed their desire to join the People's Farmer Association to jointly resolve their issues, exchanged contacts, and offered their products for sale in other regions of Russia.

Source: Press Center of the Association "People's Farmer"