This book assesses the Statute for a European Cooperative Society (SCE) regarding agricultural activities by comparing how specific questions arising in this context must be dealt with under the Italian and Austrian legal systems. In this regard, Council Regulation (EC) No. 1435/2003, of 22 July 2003, on the Statute for a European Cooperative Society (SCE), is used as a tool for the structured analysis of various aspects of agricultural cooperatives. However, a comparison is only meaningful if the results are made comparable on the basis of a previously defined standard. Accordingly, the study uses, on one hand, a cooperative model developed by European legal scholars that defines general guidelines on how cooperatives should function (PECOL). On the other, the results are presented in connection with economic considerations to discuss how efficient rules can be developed.

Farmers' cooperatives are very prevalent in the European Union, where they account for approximately half of agricultural trade and thus are key to articulating rural realities and in shaping the sustainability credentials of European food and farming. This book analyses to what extent farmers' cooperatives are working to benefit their members, are showing concern for their communities and are promoting cooperative economies. It offers a multilevel set of theoretical, disciplinary, methodological, empirical and social perspectives, using the UK and Spain as contrasting examples, and analyses whether agricultural cooperatives contribute to achieving sustainable food systems. The book presents empirical data from diverse and rich case studies, from large, international cooperatives, to small, multi-stakeholder initiatives. This provides an alternative viewpoint to that of economics, which tends to dominate the study of agricultural cooperatives. The author presents a new theoretical framework that provides a novel lens to study farmers’ cooperatives as organisations deeply embedded in power dynamics of the food system and agricultural policy that shape and constraint their potential to adopt cooperative and sustainable practices. The book is a major addition to the study of agricultural cooperatives and their impact in the development of fairer and more sustainable food systems and it is one of the first detailed accounts of multi-stakeholder food and farming cooperatives in Europe. It is a valuable resource for all scholars working on cooperatives, as well as for students studying agricultural and food policy, environmental justice and rural sociology.

The degree of development reached by cooperatives of different sectors throughout the world, which among others led to the UN declaring 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, needs to be accompanied by a similar development of corresponding legislation. To this end, a better knowledge of cooperative law from the comparative point of view, as has already been established for other types of enterprises, becomes of great importance. This book strives to fill this gap, and is divided into four parts. The first part offers an analytic and conceptual framework with which to understand, study and assess cooperative law from a transnational and comparative perspective. The second part includes several chapters dealing with attempts to harmonize cooperative laws. The third part contains an overview of more than 30 national cooperative laws, while the last part summarizes and compares these national cooperative laws, thus laying the foundation for a comparative cooperative law doctrine.

Monograph comprising a comparison of cooperative marketing of agricultural products (agricultural cooperatives) in EC countries - discusses the objectives, institutional framework, membership, financial management, agricultural management, profitability, state intervention, provision of agricultural credit, etc., and comments on economic legislation. Bibliography pp. 96 to 101 and references.

This book focuses on the use of farm level, micro- and macro-data of cooperative systems and networks in developing new robust, reliable and coherent modeling tools for agricultural and environmental policy analysis. The efficacy of public intervention on agriculture is largely determined by the existence of reliable information on the effects of policy options and market developments on farmers' production decisions and in particular, on key issues such as levels of agricultural and non-agricultural output, land use and incomes, use of natural resources, sustainable-centric management, structural change and the viability of family farms. Over the last years, several methods and analytical tools have been developed for policy analysis using various sets of data. Such methods have been based on integrated approaches in an effort to investigate the above key issues and have thus attempted to offer a powerful environment for decision making, particularly in an era of radical change for both agriculture and the wider economy.