Différenciation et expansion de la coopération agricole dans l'économie agro-alimentaire

This article concerns the role of agricultural cooperatives in agri-business especially in France and by way of comparison in Sweden, the USA and in Canada. At present in all these countries there is a distinct increase in cooperatives which is more marked in the farming and food sector than other firms. These cooperatives have industrial and commercial activities in a capitalist system and yet remain organically linked to a type of farming made up mainly of family farms. This results in specialization according to the different activities and in fewer possibilities of accumulating capital because of their particular obligations and constraints. This is why we attempt to find causes for the present expansion not only in certain forms of finance granted by the state in exchange for the specific functions fulfilled by cooperatives in agri-business but also in a new form of organization within the regional and national cooperative network, in the forming of innovation groups on the international level, in new forms of funding, and finally in a certain tendency for other firms, national and multinational, to withdraw from certain branches of the food industry. If agricultural cooperatives manage to set up the inter-cooperative (both interbranch and international) relations they are at present trying to establish, shall we see the cooperative movement and more particularly the cooperative groups increase still more the part of agri-business they already control ? Are we as the ACI (International Cooperative Alliance) believes, witnessing a new way of organizing things ? Their present expansion and this new outlook cannot avoid causing conflict with the representatives of the firms that have to submit to the ordinary rules governing firms.