One upon a time Bangladesh was a hub of cooperatives, during the time of late president Ziaur Rahman.
Bangladesh hosts around two hundred thousand cooperative societies, comprising 29 types with approximately twelve and a half million members, predominantly engaged in agricultural cooperatives.
These cooperatives facilitate production and marketing of agricultural products, minimizing reliance on middlemen.
They provide improved seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanization, enabling farmers to collaborate in harvesting, threshing, and storage.
In adverse weather conditions like floods and droughts, they unite to face challenges and natural disasters.
Currently, cooperatives are pivotal for modernizing agriculture and enhancing rural life, with an emphasis on food safety.
Agricultural cooperatives can help overcome these problems by organizing farmers and combining their resources and efforts.
Through cooperation, farmers can improve production, marketing, storage, processing, and investment, thereby strengthening their economic position.
However, cooperatives in Bangladesh have often faced problems such as illiteracy, poor management, dishonesty, lack of cooperation, financial hardship, social conflict, and negative attitudes toward collective work.
These factors make joint agricultural activities difficult. To make agricultural cooperatives successful, farmers need greater access to education, training, and information.
Public awareness campaigns should promote the benefits of cooperation, while basic agricultural and cooperative education should build farmers’ confidence and skills.
Strengthening the cooperative spirit and providing proper guidance can help transform farmers’ individual efforts into collective economic strength and contribute to the development of Bangladesh’s rural economy.
Agriculture-based cooperatives can also bring positive changes in farmers’ knowledge and use of technology.
It may be difficult for an individual farmer to regularly collect information about new varieties of seeds, modern cultivation methods, soil health, weather forecasts, pest and disease management, or market information.
A cooperative can establish organized communication with agricultural scientists, research institutions, government extension departments, and private technology organizations.
Training, field days, demonstration plots, and technology-use programs can be organized for members.
As a result, the use of scientific and information-based methods in agricultural production will increase. Agriculture-based cooperatives can also bring changes to the marketing system.
At present, digital technology has created opportunities for direct communication between farmers and consumers.
If a cooperative can list members’ products through a digital platform, receive online orders, and organize delivery, products can reach not only local markets but also urban consumers and institutional buyers.
If direct contract-based markets can be established with supermarkets, restaurants, food-processing companies, hospitals, educational institutions, or exporters, both farmers’ incomes and market stability can increase.
Agriculture-based cooperatives can also play a role in women’s economic empowerment.
In Bangladesh’s rural economy, women make important contributions to agricultural work, livestock rearing, poultry farming, seed preservation, food processing, and various other activities.
However, in many cases, the economic value of their labor is not properly recognized.
If women-centered agricultural cooperatives are established, or if women’s active participation within cooperatives is ensured, they will be able to play a more effective role in production, processing, marketing, and decision-making.
This can have positive effects both on increasing household income and on women’s financial independence.
In addition, agriculture-based cooperatives can also be effective in addressing the risks of climate change.
Floods, droughts, cyclones, salinity, excessive rainfall, and temperature changes are continuously putting Bangladesh’s agriculture at risk. It is difficult for an individual farmer to deal with these risks alone.
Through cooperatives, climate-resilient varieties, improved irrigation systems, crop diversification, water conservation, agricultural insurance, and post-disaster rehabilitation activities can be undertaken jointly.
This will allow farmers to share risks and may increase the resilience of agricultural production.
Although Bangladesh has several successful examples of cooperatives, the cooperative movement has not received sufficient attention.
Experts argue that excessive bureaucratic control over the formation, registration, management, auditing, and supervision of cooperatives has prevented the movement from developing independently.
The interests of cooperative members are often overlooked, while existing laws have not been effective enough in preventing corruption and irregularities.
Agricultural cooperatives should also be integrated into the broader national economy by strengthening connections among the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors.
Farmers can benefit when their products are supplied as raw materials to local industries, processed for domestic and international markets and by the system a fair share of the added value returns to them.
Such integration can create rural employment and wealth, reduce import dependence, increase exports, and strengthen domestic markets.
Most importantly, agricultural cooperatives should be viewed not simply as farmers’ organizations but as economic institutions.
Effective business planning, market research, accounting, technology, quality control, efficient management, and long-term investment are essential for their success.
A cooperative can become sustainable when members recognize it as an institution owned and managed by them rather than as a grant-dependent project.
Member participation, mutual trust, and cooperation are the foundation of a successful cooperative movement.
Agriculture-based cooperatives have the potential to play a multidimensional and significant role in Bangladesh’s economy.
They can reduce farmers’ production costs, increase their bargaining power in the market, ensure fair prices, add value to agricultural products, create employment, attract young people to agriculture, increase women’s economic participation, and strengthen the rural economy.
At the same time, they can contribute to food security, agricultural modernization, and climate-risk management.
Therefore, if agriculture-based cooperatives can be developed through appropriate policies, efficient management, and effective institutional structures, they will not only serve as a means of increasing farmers’ incomes but can also become an important foundation for inclusive, productive, and decentralized economic development.
In conclusion, it can be said that agricultural cooperatives will become strong only through the implementation of an integrated national policy. Ideal agricultural cooperatives can contribute to building a self-reliant country.
Moreover, ideal agricultural cooperatives can contribute to poverty reduction and employment generation.
Therefore, it can be said that agriculture-based cooperatives are capable of playing a significant role in the economy.
(The writer is former deputy director general, Bangladesh Ansar and VDP)