Agricultural Cooperative Development in Kazakhstan and Ukraine

This article reviews the evidence on agricultural service cooperatives in two countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Ukraine and Kazakhstan—and considers the reasons for their lack of development compared to the countries of North America and Western Europe. Only one farm in 246 in Ukraine and one in 31 in Hungary are members of a service cooperative, while in the US and France each farmer is a member of a service cooperative and in Italy every other farmer is a member (Table 1). There are also far more farms per cooperative in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Hungary, than in the countries of Western Europe and the US. Whereas there is only one cooperative for every 6,000 farms in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and for every 10,000 farms in Hungary, in France there exists one service cooperative for every 178 farms. This statistic also indicates that the development of service cooperatives in Eastern Europe and the CIS is far behind that in the US and Western Europe