Overview

For a farmer, growing a good crop is only half the battle — the harder half is selling that produce at a fair price. A small farmer who takes a few sacks of grain or a cart of vegetables to the market alone has almost no bargaining power: middlemen, commission agents, and traders know the farmer must sell quickly (produce is perishable, and cash is needed) and squeeze the price down, while charging heavy commissions and deductions along the way. A marketing co-operative society is the co-operative answer to this problem — many small producers joining hands to sell their produce together, so that as a group they command the bargaining strength, storage, transport, and market access that none of them could afford alone.

This chapter studies the marketing co-operative society as one of the important types of co-operative societies in the Maharashtra co-operative sector. Maharashtra's Std XI Co-operation syllabus draws on the same well-established co-operative and agricultural-marketing principles — pooling of produce, elimination of unnecessary middlemen, and collective bargaining — that underlie co-operative marketing everywhere, and it applies them to the marketing of agricultural produce such as foodgrains, cotton, sugarcane, fruits, vegetables, and milk. Maharashtra in particular is well known for large and successful marketing co-operatives, especially in sugar, cotton, and milk.

We begin with what a marketing co-operative society means, then study its features, objectives, functions, advantages, and limitations in turn.