Lipetsk region shares successful experience in cooperation development

Last week, a delegation from the Kurgan region visited the region to search for new mechanisms for the development of agricultural cooperation.
It included representatives of the Department of Agro-Industrial Complex of the Kurgan Region, the Main Departments of Social Protection of the Population and the Department of Labor and Employment, the Investment Agency of the Kurgan Region Fund, and the Fund for the Development of the Agro-Industrial Complex of the Kurgan Region.
The Lipetsk region was not chosen by chance: support for multi-level cooperation in the region has been carried out for a long time. At the moment, there are 343 agricultural consumer cooperatives in the region, uniting more than 50 thousand members. The vast majority of them are private farms.
The guests were interested in both the history of the development of the Lipetsk cooperative movement and the experience in implementing social contracts for low-income citizens. Within the framework of the meeting, issues of involving citizens leading personal subsidiary plots in agricultural cooperation, and the formation of new cooperatives were discussed. Vyacheslav Yavnykh, Director of the Competence Center of the Lipetsk Oblast Agroindustrial Complex, noted: “Successful experience in the development of the cooperative movement in the region lies both in the desire of people to live with dignity and see the fruits of their labor, and in the full support of the authorities. The creation of cooperatives in our region was taken care of long before this issue arose on the federal agenda. Since 2010, the Lipetsk region has had its own cooperation development program, which helped lay the foundation. A three-level management system for cooperatives “region-district-settlement” was formed in the region, institutions for the development of cooperation were created – the Fund for the Support of Cooperatives, the Center for the Development of Cooperatives, the regional Union of Cooperatives. Since 2014, the State Program “Development of cooperation and collective forms of ownership in the Lipetsk region” has been implemented.
To see with their own eyes how it works, to talk with successful cooperators, the Kurgan delegation visited the Usmansky district, the flagship of the cooperative movement in the region today. There, the guests visited the cooperative market, the processing marketing agricultural consumer cooperative “Polyana”, specializing in the purchase, sale of meat and meat semi-finished products, as well as the marketing (trading) supply processing agricultural consumer cooperative “Mechta”, purchasing, selling and storing vegetables.
“We are very impressed by what we saw,” Pavel Koshcheev, Director of the Department of Agro-Industrial Complex of the Kurgan Region, said in the conclusion of the meeting. “The meeting with colleagues from the Lipetsk region set us new ambitious, but quite feasible tasks.”