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Farmers Cooperatives
By Shrii Prabhat R Sarkar Providing food, clothing, housing, education and medical treatment is mostimportant for social security. These five minimum requirements are indispensableto raise the living standard of the people. To guarantee these, the principle of production based on consumption has to be adopted. Special emphasis shouldbe placed on agricultural production because the provision of food is of vitalimportance, and for this the cooperative system should be rapidly expanded.According to PROUT, too many people should not be engaged in agriculture.Rather, a major part of the population should depend on industry. Not more thanthirty to forty-five percent of the population should be employed in the agriculturalsector.Land is usually divided into economic holdings and uneconomic holdings,according to productivity. Economic holdings are those where the market price of the produce will exceed the cost of production including capital, labour andmachinery. Lands which produce economically viable agricultural wealth--that is,where output exceeds input-- are called “economic holdings”.Uneconomic holdings are those where the market price of the produce is lessthan the cost of production after including the costs of all the inputs. Asuneconomic holdings are not profitable, the landowners usually refrain fromproducing any crops. In the rural economy of a country such as India, if a villageis accepted as a production unit, then there may be many plots of land in avillage which are not used for producing crops because they are uneconomical.While implementing PROUT, the question of agrarian revolution will automaticallyarise. As I have already said, agricultural land should be brought under cooperative management, but the cooperative system should be introduced intwo stages. In the first phase of the socialization of land, PROUT will not raisethe demand for land ceilings, but the sale of agricultural land will be prohibitedand uneconomic landholdings will be brought under cooperative management.The responsibility for cultivating this land will not lie with the landowners but withthe cooperatives under the aegis of the immediate government, and with itsassistance.The landowners of the uneconomic landholdings in each village will become themembers of the cooperatives in this phase. Thus, cooperatives will only consistof those who merged their land together to make uneconomic landholdingseconomic. The landowners will give their land, and in this phase they will remainthe owners of the land. In cases where the landowners employ labour for 
 
cultivation, fifty percent of the net profit will go to the landowners and fifty percentto the laborers who work in the cooperatives.In this phase, the rivers and streams in a village should be harnessed for thecollective welfare. For instance, by constructing embankments and small damson the rivers, large-scale irrigation, electricity generation, and industries based onlocal needs should be established.The first steps must also be taken to alleviate the population pressure on land.An increasing percent of the rural population will have to be employed in industryby establishing agrico-industries and agro-industries. There should be provisionfor the preservation of crops by building stores and cold-stores under the controlof local administrative boards. The cooperatives should be supplied with tractors,manure, seeds, water pumps and other farming equipment through producers’cooperatives. Consumers’ cooperatives will supply the commodities necessaryfor daily consumption to the rural population.In the very first phase of establishing cooperatives, agricultural laborers, landlesslaborers, day laborers and sharecroppers will come within the scope of cooperatives. From this phase, the education system in rural areas should bethoroughly reformed. To arouse the cooperative spirit among the people, thereshould be extensive training and education, but moral education must takeprecedence over everything else so that people do not give greater importance toindividual interests at the expense of the collective interest.In the second phase of implementing agricultural cooperatives, the economicholdings of the landowners should be brought under cooperative management.Only after all the uneconomic holdings in a village are brought within the scope of cooperatives should the economic holdings be brought under cooperativemanagement. In this phase it will be easy to apply science and technologyextensively in agriculture, increasing the amount of production.In this second phase, all should be encouraged to join the cooperative system.The net profit will be increased in favor of the laborers working in thecooperatives so that twenty-five percent of the net profit will go to the landownersand seventy-five percent to the laborers. Here laborers means those who employeither their physical or psychic labor in the cooperative. The landowners willbenefit in two ways. First, as landowners, they will get twenty-five percent of thenet profit of the produce from the land, and secondly, if they are part of thecooperative labor force, they will be entitled to a portion of the seventy-fivepercent of the profit distributed among the cooperative members.In this phase, there must be emphasis on the rapid and large- scaleestablishment of agrico-industries and agro-industries so that the rural populationwill be dependent more on industry than on agriculture. With the development of such industries, there should be simultaneous emphasis on educational and
 
cultural reforms to further develop the cooperative mentality of the ruralpopulation.From this second phase, production for consumption will increase the standard of living of the rural population, and the basic criteria of social security that is, the
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 minimum requirements of life must be arranged for the people.
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In the third phase, there should be rational distribution of land andredetermination of ownership. The rational distribution of land will depend on twofactors the minimum holding of land necessary to maintain a family, and the
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 capacity of the farmer to utilize the land. In this phase, the landowners will not beable to employ individual laborers, landless laborers or sharecroppers for thecultivation of land, so it will be more beneficial for them to participate fully in thecooperative system.In this phase, it will be easy to establish big cooperatives with the extensiveapplication of science, but these cooperatives will not be anything like the hugecollective farms of the Soviet Union or China. If cooperatives are allowed tobecome extremely large, it will be difficult to utilize natural resources efficientlyand this will lead to complications in the sphere of production. One of the maindefects of the collective farms in socialist countries is their unmanageable size.In PROUT, the farmers’ cooperatives themselves will determine the size of thecooperatives. But while building up the cooperative system, two factors should bekept in mind first, the high quantity and quality of production should be
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 ensured through the application of science and technology while keepingproduction costs at a minimum; and secondly, the cooperative members must beencouraged to attain maximum psychic and spiritual development at their highestlevel in exchange for their minimum physical labor.In the third phase of implementing the cooperative system, one hundred percentof the net profit will be distributed among the cooperative members. The former landowners will identify fully with the cooperatives in this phase.Through these three phases it will be possible to reduce the excessive populationpressure on land and to engage thirty to forty-five percent of the population inagriculture. In the second phase, the problem of unemployment will be tackledthrough the large-scale establishment of industry, and by the third phase therewill be no unemployment problems for the agricultural laborers. By the end of thethird phase, the rural sector will be freed from the vexing problems of agriculturaland industrial production, unemployment and social security.In the fourth phase of implementing the cooperative system, there will be noconflict over the ownership of land. The agrarian problems of every village will besolved. All the social security arrangements concerned with food, clothing,housing, education and medical treatment will be easily provided to the people.
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