Beijing, China – Four hundred fifty (450) participants including farmer leaders, government officers, experts, and enterprise representatives convened on 21 December 2016 in Beijing to discuss issues about the development of China farmers’ cooperatives at the China Farmers’ Cooperatives Innovation and Development Forum held by Agricultural Management Institute of China (AMI). The event is held annually by Chinese cooperatives and aims to make the participants understand the development of cooperatives over the past year and exchange experiences with their peers.
The cooperatives exhibited their products and made promotions via live webcast which is currently popular in China. The cooperatives also received a Certification of Annual Excellent Cooperative awarded by AMI, which is an important achievement for them.
“I attend this annual meeting every year, and benefit a lot from it. It helps me know more about the development situation of the industry that I am engaged in, while it also gives me a platform to display and express my ideas. In other words, it gives me a sense of belonging,” says Ma Tingdong, leader of Shengye Strawberry Cooperative.
In China, there is still no national joint organization of farmers’ cooperatives until now, which is called for by more than 1.7 million farmers’ coops. Since the first China Farmers’ Cooperatives Innovation and Development Forum in 2012, there were more than 2,000 cooperatives that have joined in this activity, and the number of participants is increasing yearly.
The forum is supported by the MTCP2 Programme and is implemented by AMI in China. #
About MTCP2
The Medium-Term Cooperation Program Phase 2 (MTCP2), a five-year capacity building program supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and the European Union (EU), has been implemented in 19 countries across three sub-regions—Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific—engaging 1,544 sub-national farmers organizations (FOs) with a total membership of around 22 million farmers. The funding support (total budget of $ 5 million for the whole duration of the project across 19 countries) serves as a catalytic fund that will allow FOs to enhance their capacity to be effective channels of economic services to farmers. The program has contributed to the formation of the strong national platform of FOs with improved capacity to engage in policy processes and mobilize resources from mainstream agricultural development programs like extension services, credit, and pre and post-harvest facilities. The program also helped in transforming farmers’ associations into commodity-based cooperatives to strengthen the role of small-scale farmers within an inclusive and sustainable value-chain. The program is being implemented by the consortium Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA) and La Via Campesina (LVC).
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