In order to foster the competitiveness of the food supply chain, the European Commission is committed to promote and facilitate the restructuring and consolidation of the agricultural sector by encouraging the creation of voluntary agricultural producer organisations. To support the policy...

This report has been written in the framework of the EU-funded research project “Support for Farmers’ Cooperatives”. This project was commissioned by the European Commission DG Agriculture and Rural Development, and carried out in 2011 and 2012 by a large consortium of researchers from...

The imbalances in bargaining power between the contracting parties in the food supply chain have drawn much attention, also from policy makers. The European Commission is committed to facilitate the restructuring of the sector by encouraging the creation of voluntary agricultural producer...

This literature review summarizes research on member influence in cooperatives conducted in Scandinavia and some of the research conducted in West Germany. The review divides the contents of member influence into three components: individual factors, the cooperative organization's internal...

Social capital is one of the most crucial factors determining the effectiveness of operations in a cooperative organisation. When membership of a cooperative decreases, the financial capital also decreases. An important asset of cooperatives is the commitment and loyalty of their members....

Based on a survey on farmers in Finland, this study examined the extent to which farmer co-operatives enjoy social capital within their memberships as they become internationalised. Findings from limited dependent variable regressions suggest that one group of farmers is loyal to the...