On the Development of Collective Forms of Management in Samara Oblast: Activities of Cooperative Organizations
The concept of sustainable development of rural areas has set the tasks for the development of collective forms of farming in the countryside, the main of which are cooperatives. Developed agricultural cooperation is the most important mechanism for increasing production efficiency and social stability in society. It allows providing the population with high-quality food products of its own production, increasing the level of their income. However, activities of cooperative organizations are not covered fully enough, and activities themselves are poorly developed. Samara Oblast is one of the regions with a low development of supply, marketing and processing cooperation. At the same time, credit cooperation is developing quite actively here. The region’s administration pays attention to the development of cooperative organizations. Support is provided mainly in the form of subsidizing interest rates on loans under the State Development Program. Despite the measures taken by the regional government bodies, in recent years the region has seen a decrease in the number of agricultural consumer cooperatives. For more than twenty years, Russian agricultural cooperation has been developing in market conditions. This development is not going without problems. Heads of agricultural enterprises and of municipal districts understand that it is impossible to stabilize and increase the efficiency of the agricultural sector, to develop rural areas without the development of production cooperative organizations. Empirical material was obtained through surveying in order to form certain ideas about the rural residents’ awareness of the activities of cooperative organizations, of their involvement in the social life of the village and in the increasing of the population’s social activity. The results of the survey show that the respondents have little understanding of the activities of agricultural cooperatives. When asked about the awareness of their activities, every third respondent answered that he had heard something about cooperatives of the 1990s. For all the difficulties, the cooperative movement in the countryside is a condition for the successful promotion of food products produced by small forms of farming. Agricultural cooperation can become a serious force not only in achieving the individual goals of consumers, workers of the consumer cooperation system and shareholders, in strengthening their personal well-being and social security, but also in implementing national tasks, priority national projects, targeted programs, and ensuring the population’s employment.