Reaching The Rural Poor Through Agricultural Cooperatives In Mongolia

This paper focuses on the cooperative sector in central Mongolia. Its aim is to provide new insights into the role and importance of cooperatives among poor rural populations. We analyse cooperatives' inclusiveness of smaller herders and farmers and cooperatives' governance structures. The research is based on data collected in selected provinces of the central Tov region. The data were collected for three distinctive target groups – cooperative board members, cooperative members and non-members. We found that the cooperative sector in Mongolia is strongly affected by the governmental policy regarding wool subsidies, which provides subsidies only to cooperative members and has consequently caused rapid growth in the number of new, free-riding cooperative members and led to very low levels of members' self-identification with their cooperatives. This policy also affects the inner organizational structures of cooperatives. Further, we found indications that poorer farmers tend not to be members of cooperatives and that the overall benefits for non-members and the general community arising from local cooperatives are rather low.