Sociology and Space, No. 35-36, 1972.
Original scientific paper
Agro-industrial conflicts and agricultural co-operatives
Aleksandar Raič
Abstract
Yugoslav agriculture is undergoing a process of integration which is due to
the concentration of productive forces in other branches of the country’s economy.
For agriculture, integration means an increasingly sharp confrontation with many
agro-business and financial centres.
The author is trying empirically to verify the hypothesis about the inability
of the classical co-operative system to solve the conflict between the expansive
agro-business systems and local rural socio-economic structures. On the example
of the recession of agricultural co-operatives in Vojvodina he shows how co-operatives
are changing into mechanisms of an industrial colonization of rural areas:
the vilage is left without a defending mechanism; industrial colonies in rural
areas have an assimilating, even discriminatory effect; and the peasants are pushed
to the marginal spheres of economic operation.
According to the author there is very little prospect for solving the agro-
-industrial conflicts by means of co-operatives. As an association, the co-operative
should in practice come as close as possible to Tönnies’s socio-economic type of
Gemeinschaft, while as an enterprise it can survive only if it develops according
to the Gesellschaft type. Vojvodina agricultural co-operatives are developing in the
latter direction. In conditions of agro-business integration the co-operative is thus
becoming a factor of the colonizing system of big urban industrial integrators of
agriculture. Thus the conflict between big integrational systems, which increasingly
dominate agriculture, and rural local communities, represented by co-operatives
as associations of peasants, still remains open.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
119627
URI
Publication date:
9.6.1972.
Visits: 1.195 *