Year Book of Agricultural Co-operation 1966 [antikvár]

Year Book of Agricultural Co-operation1966CO-OPERATION IN 1966The Year Book for 1966, and to somé extent its predecessor of 1965, show clearly that the co-operative movement in most countries has reached a point of self-questioning, leading to new and far-reaching decisions. The economy within which it works is itself in the course of rapid change and the opportunities and pressures are nőt what they were even ten years ago. This is true both of the industrial economies of Europe and North America and in the still mainly agricultural economies of the developing world. Superficially the problem is different in each case; fundamentally it is the same: how to use the co-operative system to bring farming itself into line with modern needs, technical, economic and social.The challenge comes partly from new methods of farming, partly from new methods of handling farm produce. Even the farm run on more or less traditional lines is demanding a larger and larger investment of capital, in chemical and engineer-ing products, in imported feeding stuffs, in increasingly elaborate buildings, in drainage and irrigation systems. The factory farm, whether it is with us for a long future or is finally discredited on humanitarian or economic grounds, is in its present form an even greater absorbant of capital, principally because it calls for a scale of operation in which only the highly capitalized can engage.At the same time, the production of agricultural requirements and the marketing and distribution of agricultural produce are passing more and more into the hands of a few large commercial organizations. Moreover, marketing and supply are becoming increasingly linked with one another through systems of verticai integration and two-way contracts. The aim is not only an abso-lute control of volume, but an absolutely uniform product which lends itself to economical processing and automatic sale.