Producer Cooperatives

Cooperatives are currently being promoted in Mongolia as a mechanism for improving the governance of common pool resources. Do cooperatives work? We can't necessarily determine this discursively or experimentally, but we can definitely discuss the challenges of such forms of social organization.

• It is difficult to share ownership of livestock (etc.) when group members move frequently, and with uncertainty. This is an issue of scale: the household--or, in some cases, the xot ail--can manage to stay connected all the time, but at larger scales it becomes more challenging. This is the problem with the "malchdyn bu'leg". The negdel (collective), at a larger scale, is potentially suitable since it manages a large enough territory and number of households to be able to manage things effectively and with adequate flexibility. But the challenge here is that we need to have ongoing communication. I might suggest that it would be a good idea to grant management of rangeland resources to sum-scale organizations.
• Consumer and producer cooperatives provide a degree of price security and quality assurance. We need to be wary of schemes that prevent producers from distributing livestock or other products through kinship channels or other means--for example, to small scale downstream producers, or through local fairs or farmers' markets, directly to consumers, etc. The problem with allowing outside sales is that third parties can undermine the cooperative. It makes sense to allow producers to have a certain number of "private" livstock, as they did during the socialist period.

These points lead us to discuss in close detail the differences between the experiences of "socialist" and "capitalist" production (notwithstanding the fact that these production modes were not necessarily all that different). Why were the collectives dismantled? What did we learn from the experience? It would be worthwhile to ask a number of people about this.

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