Innovations in Cooperative Finance: Proceedings of the December 1990 Conference

These papers were presented at a conference sponsored by the Center for Cooperatives in December 1990. In recent years there has been a number of cooperatives in the United States that have significantly modified their basic structure by either selling out to an investor owned fIrm (IOF),or organizing a subsidiary where the cooperative retains a majority share of the stock and sells the remaining stock to the general public. Professor Collin, following Schrader's initial work, lists three possible motives for these actions. First, the desire of the cooperative to increase its equity base in order to expand market share through asset expansion. Second, the liquidation motive where members of the cooperative nearing retirement wish to liquidate their share of the equity including the market value of the assets. The third motivation is a takeover bid from an IOF because it fIts into the expansion plan of a competing corporation. The fIrst paper in these proceedings is John How land's presentation of the "American Rice International Story." How land draws a picture of the environment in 1988 when the membership of ARI voted to form a new fIrm and sell out their equity share to an IOF while retaining 52 percent of the voting stock in the new corporation. The second paper in the series is Professor Collin's paper "An Economic Evaluation of Cooperative Restructuring" where he looks at the experience of several cooperatives that have recently gone through a restructuring. The third paper is by Professor Castanias, who reports on "Problems and Issues in Cooperative Financing." The fourth paper by Randall Torgerson, Administrator of the Agricultural Cooperative Service is a rebuttal of the trend towards privatization titled ''Why Cooperatives Should Stay Cooperatives". The last two papers are cases in point where cooperatives have attempted to satisfy the liquidity motive by creating secondary markets in either their base capital plan or transferable delivery rights.These two papers are by Don Schulak, CPO of Tri Valley Growers and by George Crispin, Vice President of Agripac.