num_pages: 200
description: Written ten years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and on the eve of eastern enlargement of the European Union, this book presents the overview and the details of cooperative development in the Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian agricultural sectors. The sweeping changes of transition to modern market economies have revolutionized the ordered life and perspectives of the countryside in Central Europe. Underlying this first major factual description and comparison of agricultural cooperatives in the region is the call to its farmers to take their future in their own hands. Theirs is the challenge to organize their market channels, secure sources of income, and create a viable rural fabric. The authors emphasize that getting institutional structures right requires a fundamental redesign of transformed cooperatives from the socialist era. Also, there is an urgent need for genuinely new farmers' initiatives, producers' association and marketing groups to be reinforced and promoted. Farmer representatives, cooperative practitioners, government officials and politicians in both East and West, business consultants and academics -- this book is written to better inform and advise them as they contriubute to preparing Central European agriculture for accession.
language: English
title: Agricultural Co-operatives in the European Union: Trends and Issues on the Eve of the 21st Century
titlecomplete: Agricultural Co-operatives in the European Union: Trends and Issues on the Eve of the 21st Century
publisher: Van Gorcum and Comp BV