Cooperatives, the State, and Corporate Power in African Export Agriculture

Cooperatives, the State, and Corporate Power in African Export Agriculture PDF Author: KARIN. WEDIG
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367660543
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Agriculture is a major contributor to Africa's GDP, the region's biggest source of employment and its largest food producer. However, agricultural productivity remains low and buyer-driven global value chains offer few opportunities for small producers to upgrade into higher value-added activities. In recent years, the revival of Africa's cooperatives has been celebrated by governments and international donors as a pathway towards inclusive agricultural development, and this book explores the strengths but also the issues which surround these cooperatives. The book scrutinizes the neoliberal ideal of economic prosperity arising through the operation of liberalized labor markets by illuminating the discriminatory nature of Uganda's informal labor relations. It points to the role of cooperatives as a potential instrument of progressive change in African export agriculture, where large numbers of small producers depend on casual wage work in addition to farming. In contrast to the portrayal, advanced by some governments and rarely questioned by donors, of an unproblematic co-existence of small producers' collective action and big capital interests, the author calls for a re-politicized debate on the Social and Solidarity Economy. As part of this, she highlights the adverse political and economic conditions faced by African cooperatives, including intense international competition in agricultural processing, inadequate access to infrastructure and services, and at times antagonistic state-cooperative relations. Supported by wide-ranging interdisciplinary evidence, including new ethnographic, survey and interview data, this book shows how cooperatives may be co-opted by both the state and corporations in a discourse that ignores structural inequalities in value chains and emphasizes poverty reduction over economic and political empowerment. It provides a critique of New Institutional Economics as a framework for understanding how institutions shape redistribution, and develops a political economy approach to explore the conditions for structural change in African export agriculture.

Economics of Cooperative Farming

Economics of Cooperative Farming PDF Author: Ferenc Fekete
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401713790
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The present scientific and technical revolution has brought science into the range of the most effective forces of production. The formula "science= production force" applies also to the social sciences whose explorations of human relationships and drives have reached previously unsuspected depths. Objectives, such as higher living standards and full employment, economic growth and stability, social equity and security, have both called for and provided a basis for the exploitation of possibilities offered by the natural and technical sciences. In today's agriculture, age-old traditions are in the process of disintegra tion, but the heredity of a century (or that of even a millennium as in Hungary) does not get dissolved without defending itself. Technical progress and social restratification, the emergence of new scales of values and preferences, the adjustment of the rural communities to their new tasks and conditions - all these have transformed farm operations and farming techniques. But agriculture, even under its revolutionized surface, still hides deep, almost untouched layers. If economists and agriculturalists are perplexed by the multitude and variety of the visible farm problems, there exist many others about which they can only guess, which they must follow up. In formulating and solving these problems, agricultural economists have professional tasks: (1) facilitating the most efficient use of agricultural resources from the standpoint of the national economy, and (2) helping farmers and farm people to attain their stated, socially feasible objectives.

Cooperatives, the State, and Corporate Power in African Export Agriculture

Cooperatives, the State, and Corporate Power in African Export Agriculture PDF Author: KARIN. WEDIG
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367660543
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
Agriculture is a major contributor to Africa's GDP, the region's biggest source of employment and its largest food producer. However, agricultural productivity remains low and buyer-driven global value chains offer few opportunities for small producers to upgrade into higher value-added activities. In recent years, the revival of Africa's cooperatives has been celebrated by governments and international donors as a pathway towards inclusive agricultural development, and this book explores the strengths but also the issues which surround these cooperatives. The book scrutinizes the neoliberal ideal of economic prosperity arising through the operation of liberalized labor markets by illuminating the discriminatory nature of Uganda's informal labor relations. It points to the role of cooperatives as a potential instrument of progressive change in African export agriculture, where large numbers of small producers depend on casual wage work in addition to farming. In contrast to the portrayal, advanced by some governments and rarely questioned by donors, of an unproblematic co-existence of small producers' collective action and big capital interests, the author calls for a re-politicized debate on the Social and Solidarity Economy. As part of this, she highlights the adverse political and economic conditions faced by African cooperatives, including intense international competition in agricultural processing, inadequate access to infrastructure and services, and at times antagonistic state-cooperative relations. Supported by wide-ranging interdisciplinary evidence, including new ethnographic, survey and interview data, this book shows how cooperatives may be co-opted by both the state and corporations in a discourse that ignores structural inequalities in value chains and emphasizes poverty reduction over economic and political empowerment. It provides a critique of New Institutional Economics as a framework for understanding how institutions shape redistribution, and develops a political economy approach to explore the conditions for structural change in African export agriculture.

Collective Courage

Collective Courage PDF Author: Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271064269
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Cooperatives in Agribusiness

Cooperatives in Agribusiness PDF Author: United States. Farmer Cooperative Service
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural industries
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description


Freedom Farmers

Freedom Farmers PDF Author: Monica M. White
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469643707
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Bet the Farm

Bet the Farm PDF Author: Beth Hoffman
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 164283159X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
"Eloquent and detailed...It's hard to have hope, but the organized observations and plans of Hoffman and people like her give me some. Read her book -- and listen." -- Jane Smiley, The Washington Post In her late 40s, Beth Hoffman decided to upend her comfortable life as a professor and journalist to move to her husband's family ranch in Iowa--all for the dream of becoming a farmer. There was just one problem: money. Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019, and many struggle just to stay afloat. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth's eyes. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass finished beef is a nightmare. If Beth can't make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don't have other jobs to fall back on hack it? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.

Farmers, Cooperatives, and USDA

Farmers, Cooperatives, and USDA PDF Author: Wayne David Rasmussen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural credit
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description


How to Start a Cooperative

How to Start a Cooperative PDF Author: United States. Department of Agriculture. Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural societies
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description


Measuring the Economic Impact of Cooperatives in Minnesota

Measuring the Economic Impact of Cooperatives in Minnesota PDF Author: Joe Folsom
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural surveys
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description


Economic Theory of Cooperation

Economic Theory of Cooperation PDF Author: Ivan Vasiy Emelianoff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cooperation
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description