If Agricore delegates agree to ditch the company’s co-operative structure and merge with United Grain Growers, it might close a chapter on one kind of farmer co-operatives.
But farmers shouldn’t think the co-operative structure or ideal is dying out, says Murray Fulton, a professor with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan.
Both small and large co-operatives are surviving and even flourishing in Canada and the United States, he said. The proposed dissolution of Agricore’s co-operative structure and Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s 1995 decision to drop many of its co-operative features says more about the grain industry and about the perils of centralization than it does about co-operatives in general, said Fulton.
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“Some quite large co-ops are doing quite well,” said Fulton, mentioning Federated Cooperatives Ltd. and the network of co-operative retail stores it serves.
“The large centralized co-ops … have been doing not nearly so well.”
Fulton said grain-handling co-operatives such as Agricore and Sask Pool have become highly centralized, with decision making performed in head offices removed from grassroots members.
That may have severed the bond many farmers felt they had with their co-operatives, Fulton said. Farmers began to question what their co-operative did for them, especially when the co-operative grain companies began closing local elevators with little consultation with local pool committees.
Fulton thinks the pools – Sask Pool and Agricore, which is made up of the former Alberta Wheat Pool and Manitoba Pool Elevators – might also have lost much of their connection with members when they stopped serving as a political lobbying voice for farmers.
Fulton said the three prairie pools once aggressively lobbied for general farm interests, which made them different from companies like Cargill or Pioneer.
But by the late 1980s, serious splits developed in the farm community over issues such as the Crow Benefit rail transportation subsidy. The pools found some of their membership didn’t want the company to get involved in divisive stands.
The pools backed away from policy positions and began focusing on grain handling.
By this time the grain industry was changing.
“Some of the directors, the members, paid more attention to some of the political activities and less attention to trying to figure out what services to offer and how to deal with the changing nature of the grain handling industry.”
The pools then attempted to catch up.
“They tried to correct and got caught up on the commercial side, which meant the closure of many of these small elevators, and in a way that was then too big of a change.”
This alienated members who still believed in the co-op structure, said Fulton.
“They had waited too long to make a change and when they made it, they made it too fast all at once.”
Co-ops could have fared better if there had been less stress on the grain handling industry in general, he said. “A lot of organizations are not able to chart their way through this minefield,” said Fulton. “There are non-co-op organizations that aren’t able to do it well either.”
