지역농업협동조합의 조합원 참여증대방안에 관한 연구

Abstract

A Study on Enhancement Plans of Members' Participation in the Korean Regional Agricultural Cooperatives

Lee, Dong-Un Advisor : Prof. LEE, Cheong-Ho Department of Management Graduate School of Business Administration Chosun University

Korean agriculture, faced with the world agricultural trade reform represented by the establishment of the World Trade Organization(WTO), is on the verge of restructuring. The trend of market opening in agricultural sector implies an emergence of a crisis not only for Korean agriculture but also for the Agricultural Cooperatives.

The Korean Agricultural Cooperatives is a large organization as a whole in terms of their membership, financial and human resources, wide range of business activities. The characteristics of this Cooperatives are 1) government initiation in organization, 2) complex business functions, 3) roles as a governmental institution, 4) alienation of the members from cooperative management.

The first characteristics originated from the old system under which the presidents of each cooperatives and National Agricultural Cooperatives Federation(NACF) were appointed by the government. The second implies that the scope of business covered by the Cooperatives is excessively wide. The Cooperatives provides wide range of business activities and public services to farmers and rural residents. The third means that the Cooperatives can achieve enormous credit and market power based on the image of a governmental body free from bankruptcy. The last characteristic is that the rate of participation of members in cooperatives management is so low.

Agricultural Cooperatives is an organization which is based on democracy, self-help and bottom-up system. However the cooperatives in Korea couldn't follow the principle, because they were organized by the government's initiatives. As a result, the Cooperatives have been operated mainly under the government control. The members were, therefore, not interested in their cooperatives and lacked in the consciousness of 'self-coop', which necessarily brought about negative participation in their coop's activities.

The major factors hampering the members' participation of the agricultural cooperatives are believed as follows ;

At first, from the Cooperatives operation's point of view, the members have been regulated by the concerned laws and regulations. Though the agricultural cooperatives' Law was revised in 1988 and the presidents of cooperatives are being elected by their members respectively, there are still many institutional regulations.

Secondly, since the most of government jobs concerned with agricultural development policies were entrusted to the cooperatives by the government, the Cooperatives were not in a position to do their business according to their members' will.

Thirdly, there were lacked in reciprocal communications between the cooperatives and their members, because of the geographical and institutional distances mainly caused by coops-merger program in the 1970s. This program was designed to enlarge the economic scale of small cooperatives and to increase their competitiveness in the local markets. As a result, this program lengthened the geographical distance between the cooperatives and its members.

The methods to enhance the members' participation of the agricultural cooperatives are as follows.

1. To enhance the members' participation in the cooperatives management, the Cooperatives must establish the democratic operating system. Also the agricultural cooperative's law and system should be reformed in order to reflect members' opinions. The agricultural community thus must prepare a systematic apparatus in which the members representative of group can participate fairly. We also have to exclude the business in discord with the understanding between the farmers and the agricultural community.

2. The purpose of the agricultural policy by the government lies in balancing the agricultural income with the level of income in the other industrial fields. Therefore, to participate more positively to the governmental agricultural policy, the agricultural cooperatives have to exert for the attainment of reasonable prices in the agricultural products and the guarantee of participation in the establishment of the agricultural policy.

3. The agricultural cooperatives must increase the income of agricultural community and its welfare through the positive participation in the whole business processes such as the establishment of the business plan.

4. The business of the agricultural cooperatives must expand and develop from medical facilities, touring, building, embellishment business and the business in relation to the old men and women, even to the improving business of living welfare in agriculture such as the living culture and the living plan guidance and so on.

In order to overcome the crisis of the agricultural cooperatives and to recreate the cooperatives more fruitful and efficient groups, the profits of the cooperatives should be linked to that of farmers through democratic management, and also the characteristics of the cooperatives should be capitalized. This is the only survival strategy to maintain agriculture under the WTO system.