In recent decades, family farming (FF) has demonstrated that, with support from wellcoordinated policies on productive inclusion, it has the capacity to generate employment and income for rural dwellers, and to become a pillar for the development of rural territories. These capabilities are further bolstered under associative models, which include different types of cooperative undertakings. These models have played a key role in increasing the quality and quantity of family farming products, in bolstering the capacity of family farming to access markets, and in increasing equal access to the benefits of agri-food activities.
New telecommunication tools, information technologies and digital tools for managing production and marketing processes afford a new opportunity to strengthen the management of FF cooperatives. The active involvement of agricultural and other types of cooperative undertakings is necessary in order to fully capitalize on this opportunity.
To provide these services, cooperatives can set up management units for this purpose or collaborate with other cooperatives of professionals, specialists and transporters, or packaging, financial, risk management and insurance cooperatives. This is not a novel idea, given that these service management units already exist. However, we must strengthen these units and improve access to new technologies. To this end, it is important to analyze agricultural and other types of cooperative undertakings that provide services for FF.
Within the framework of the agreement between Cooperatives of the Americas and IICA, a cooperation program will be designed to strengthen the capabilities of cooperative undertakings that provide services for FF, with a view to bolstering their capacity to foster the dissemination and adoption of innovative ICT-based technologies among different types of cooperatives. This, in turn, will allow for improving the productive and commercial management of FF in selected chains.
