Federations of Co‐Operatives and Organized Interests in Agriculture. An analysis of the Spanish Experience

Abstract

A gricultural co-operatives have attracted considerably more attention from scientists, particularly economists, in research on collective action in agriculture, than have federations of co-operatives. The wide bibliography on agricultural cooperatives contrasts with the scarcity of such material on the associations (federations) used by the co-operative movement to represent its interests and influence decision-making institutions. 1 This accounts for the lack of interest in federations of agricultural co-operatives, not only in the academic world, but also among farmers, many of whom have little understanding of the role and raison d'être of these claim-oriented associations.Economists have generally analyzed co-operatives from a rational choice point of view, in an attempt to understand their organizational rationale and their role in relation to the market. They have departed from both the formulation of transaction cost and market failure to analyze their external and internal dimensions. Cooperatives have also been analyzed sociologically, as processes of collective action expanding throughout the wider society and thus becoming a significant social phenomenon, regulated in some countries by special laws. Traditionally, while sociologists have emphasized the social function of co-operatives and their non-economic attributes, they have been unable to elaborate a unified view. The Danish sociologist Torben Bager has analyzed the dynamics of co-operatives as formal organizations affected in two dimensions: legitimacy efficiency and context action. He asserts that such dynamics "can only be understood properly through a bridging of rational choice and institutional approaches" 2 (Bager 1996, p. 7).Nevertheless, federations of co-operatives act in a political field of interest representation that is frequently influenced by the state through official decision-making institutions. In modern democracies, the state creates or promotes institutional frameworks to channel the participation of organized interest groups in decisionmaking processes. Co-operatives, as one such organized interest group, form federations in order to participate in these institutional frameworks. The state then imposes certain rules on the participants, which both order the field of representation and condition the organizational models. Sociologists, therefore, need to use neo-insti-

Economies of Scale Versus Participation: a Co-operative Dilemma?

“…While few mergers occurred, these pressures resulted in several bankruptcies or conversions of firms into conventionally owned firms. in Spain Moyano-Estrada et al (2001) report how pressures to realize diverse forms of economies of scale led to co-ordination and mergers among agricultural co-ops. Thus from 1994 to 1999 the number of agricultural coops fell from 5376 to 3925 and average size increased.…”