Walking the tightrope: Latin American agricultural cooperatives and small-farmer participation in global markets

Smallholder agricultural producers in Latin America today face multiple challenges and opportunities that arise from an increasingly globalized economy. Global processes of privatization and deregulation, new systems of marketing, greater competition with privately owned and corporate agribusiness, and the reduction of state intervention in the agricultural sector have transformed the way states, private investors, and rural producers interact. To conduct research at the community level, we surveyed a statistically valid sample of 30 cooperative members and their households in each community. Household surveys focused on livelihood diversification strategies, views on cooperative performance, and impacts of the cooperative on household decision making. To understand the agricultural cooperatives presented in the different papers, it is important to place them in the larger historical context of the development of cooperatives and co-operativism in Latin America.