18 | P a g e gender specific cooperatives7 reaching as high as 65% and 95% respectively (ILO, 2015, p. 7).
Women also have their cooperatives to fight inequality and social exclusion and are thus geared towards resolving the AQ of gender. However, there still is much potential for the cooperatives to bring women further to the front line in agriculture. This is because there are inequalities in the access to education; which affects access to information, level skills, land ownership and access to finance. This is why women’s participation in cash crop cooperative groups was found to be low in studies of cocoa and coffee production in west Africa and some parts of east Africa (ILO, 2015, p. 7), or cotton, sugar and tobacco production in Zimbabwe (Mazwi &
Muchetu, 2015, p. 27). However, as discussed, cooperatives offer education to women so that they can overcome/reduce these gender inequalities in access to resources.
19 | P a g e 1.6.1 Research questions
The overall research question was “What is the potential of cooperativism in challenging, reducing and eradicating poverty & underdevelopment (the contemporary AQ) of the countryside?” Specific questions derived from the objectives were:
1) Can cooperativism survive and prosper within a capitalist and industrialised national mode of production?
2) What is the effect of post-land reform realities on the growth and development of cooperativism?
3) What is the state of cooperativism in Zimbabwe, and what are the future opportunities for growth?
4) What role should the state play in the development of cooperatives?
5) What form of cooperative framework is ideal for the post-reform cooperative movement in Zimbabwe?
1.6.2 Problem statement
At the heart of the problem addressed in this thesis is the AQ in a fast liberalising national production model. About 92% of Zimbabwe’s farming community is small to medium-scale (Moyo S. , 2011c, p. 512); additionally, over 67% of the population lives in the countryside and solely depend on agriculture (ZimStats, 2012; Index-Mundi, 2016). In these spaces, women provide up to 48% of the on-farm labour8, and still, they cannot meet household food requirements (FAO, 2011, pp. 8-10). Access to inputs and outputs markets is depressed, and when farmers eventually access these markets, they have to pay vast amounts of money to get inputs while at the same time being paid very little for their produce. They have limited spaces to negotiate. The farmers are left at the mercy of the markets or as Pinto (2009, p. 3) put it,
‘throw the rural organisations into the water and let us see which ones can swim’. These problems, as highlighted earlier, are part of the contemporary AQ and thus, the contemporary AQ summarises the problem statement of this study.
The peasants are the backbone of food production and their exclusion from development has affected the whole economy. The adverse effects of the neo-liberal policies of the 1990s are
8 Women’s work in agriculture includes as farmers, family labour, as paid and unpaid labour on other farmers. The value of women labour is an aggregate estimate of the above and excludes domestic chores like cooking and firewood fetching (FAO, 2011, p. 8)
20 | P a g e still visible in the countryside, and the government and the markets have failed to find a lasting solution to this problem. In Zimbabwe, the last two decades have seen a drastic reduction of support for the cooperative movement and rural development by the ‘incapacitated’ state. On the other hand, most influential multilateral agencies ignored or reduced their support for them.
In summary, therefore, the problem is that there is an unprecedented increase of volatility of input & output markets, unfair trade practices, climate change, environmental degradation and gender inequalities that restrict development of the rural areas.
The contradictions of neoliberal capitalism express themselves through agrarian relations in various forms of ‘accumulation through dispossession’, concentrating and centralising agribusiness capital, privatising states, redistributing social resources away from labouring classes and peasantries, and degrading environments. – (McMichael, 2007, p. 415)
Moreover, with Zimbabwe in focus, the land reform that was carried out in 2000 has yet to produce its desired production objectives fully. Although the state has made significant efforts through subsidies and mechanisation, a lot still needs to be done for the resettled farmer through provision of finance, technical know-how and stable commodity markets. What then is the best way of developing the rural area and solving the agrarian question in the Global South? How can we advance a development trajectory for the rural folks that protects them from the vagaries of capitalist exploitation and ensures that the peasantry regains control of their rural economies? This is the problem that motivates this research study which I seek to resolve. The thesis suggests that the first point of call is strengthening the social organisations and amplifying their voices through the formation of peasant cooperatives. This is in line with Patnaik P. (2017, pp. 176-180)’s argument that an alliance between the peasants and the workers to level the playing field against capitalist system hegemony, and I further argue that alliances are best forged through formation of cooperatives within these two respective classes.
1.6.3 Study justification
Studies conducted on Zimbabwe’s land reform typically focused on the politics of land reform, primarily seeking to demonise and discredit the process. However, scholarship needs to realise the irrevocable character of the process and start research that provides solutions henceforth.
A few extensive studies on the nature of post-FTLRP communities in Zimbabwe focused on varying aspects of group dynamics, kith/kinship, community building and formation of
21 | P a g e collective action. While some looked at overall community social development (observed through relations between/among the new settlers and former workers as an example), and the rules that government their interaction (Munyuki-Hungwe, 2011); others have looked at the origins of the farm beneficiaries and how their diverse backgrounds contributed or limited participation in the formation of local social organisations. For example, Murisa (2009) related rural agency (chapter five) to the people who benefited (chapter six), their relations with local actors, village authority, state agents and how this facilitated platforms for mobilisation of collective action and interactions within the local community (chapter seven). In his PhD thesis on Mazowe district, Chiweshe (2011) also looked at the emerging communities and how they were striving to attain social cohesion and access social services (based on their background and social characteristics – discussed in his thesis’s chapter five and seven) using farm-level institutions. Overall, the focus of these studies was to discover all the different forms of social organisations emerging from the FTLRP and how they improved access to social services.
None of these studies emphasised the socio-economic role of cooperatives in the rural areas.
What I attempt to do in this study is to focus on a particular form of social organisation – the cooperatives. My interest in cooperative is driven by their need to provide socio-economic services, reduce production costs, improve access to output markets and increase incomes;
which are essential in the resolution of the contemporary AQ. My focus is on understanding the forms of socio-economical organisations that can improve the socio-economic agency of communities when engaging with the state and market apparatus. Thus, I try to understand how cooperatives improve farmer agency, and how the current cooperative model can learn from other countries – Japan – that utilised this approach after their land reforms. This type of intensive comparative analysis focusing on cooperatives is missing from literature and thus justifies this study.
Some comparative studies that have been carried out indeed compared policies, but only limiting comparison to “homogenous” African countries. However, no African country has carried out a “radical and comprehensive” Fast Track Land Reform Program at a scale and scope as Zimbabwe, like what Japan did after the WWII. Therefore, the term ‘need to study homogenous African experiences’ become just a cliché and outright irrelevant in this respect.
This study intends to go beyond such academic traditional restrictions and review agricultural cooperative-related policies pursued by Japan in the post-1945s and derive insights from it to better understand and develop a way forward for Zimbabwe’s cooperative sector.
22 | P a g e Cooperatives are an old idea, but an idea that has never been thoroughly tested in practice, especially in Africa where they were (mis)used as quasi-state agents after independence.
However, in countries in the Global North, it has been very successful, especially in the case of Japan in which part of this thesis is situated. In recent times, agricultural cooperatives have been very successful in China. The global cooperative movement financial footprint stood at US$3 trillion in 2014 making it one of the biggest organisations both in terms of membership and economic hegemony in the world (Schwettmann, 2014, p. 1). Despite this much potential, cooperatives have not made it into public and policy development discourses. They virtually continue to be misunderstood especially at the corporate and government level as seen through various efforts to control these organisations or in some cases, totally refusing to support them (Thompson, 1994; Schwettmann, 2000, p. 5).
Therefore, this thesis seeks to help bring cooperativism to the fore and get policymakers and development agents to consider cooperativism as a conduit for rural development, fight against poverty and inequalities within the peasantry. The thesis seeks to stimulate discussions on the potential and roles that cooperatives can play in the design and implementation of rural finance programs, rural agricultural marketing and implementation of locally initiated development programs in the rural areas.
1.6.4 Scope and limitations of the thesis
In the pursuit of understanding the role of community in the Community-Market-State (CMS) framework, I could not analyse all forms of social organisations obtaining in the rural areas;
thus, I limited my study to agricultural cooperatives. In this sense, other forms of social organisations such as religious clubs, football clubs, burial societies, health clubs and national farmer organisation are not defined as cooperative in this study. Some types of cooperatives such as agricultural labour groups (those that look for agricultural work as groups) were also not defined as agricultural cooperatives. In this respect, agricultural cooperatives were composed of people involved in agricultural production and marketing as farmers (including irrigation schemes, equipment sharing schemes, agricultural consortiums and commodity associations). This was the most significant scope and limitation for the study in both Japan and Zimbabwe.
The study focused its comparative aspects on understanding the realities facing farmers after their respective land reforms in both Zimbabwe and Japan. The first two to three decades after land reform were of particular importance to my research as they defined what would later
23 | P a g e become a success in Japanese agriculture, and present themselves as one of the biggest challenges in Zimbabwean agriculture. Contemporary issues in Japan agricultural cooperatives were also of interest because they indicate the long-term effects of the various choices made in the first two to three decades after the land reform. Additionally, I analysed the contemporary issues in Japanese cooperatives. Due to the challenges of collecting data using the same instruments between Japan and Zimbabwe (mainly due to the fact that household survey data is available in Japan and not available in Zimbabwe), the study used a household questionnaire in Zimbabwe and mainly guided interviews supplemented by secondary household data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) in Japan.
The cooperative movement in Japan is more diverse and can be distinguished in terms of their adherence to ideological frameworks, unlike in Zimbabwe where farmers join the cooperatives more ‘to increase their incomes’ and not because of the goodness of an ‘ideology’
(Schwettmann, 2000, p. 57). Thus, based on this, I decided to widen the scope of the study to three different types of cooperatives in three different Japanese villages (Sanbu, Nose and Ryuo – corresponding to different ideological thrust) and compare the three to different villages in Zimbabwe (Buena Vista, Xanadu and Chikwaka – focus on increased incomes for farmers).
Studying and collecting qualitative data in Japan was a challenge, ranging from the language barrier to the complexity of the Japanese society in which a researcher needs more time with the respondents in order to understand underlying lifestyles that are often different from the public or face-value. Furthermore, the aggregate data on cooperatives is hardly available across the globe, and hence understanding their overall contribution is a big hurdle given the fact that a significant portion of their activities are ‘social services’ in nature. Qualitative and quantitative data on the actual impact of the national cooperative is challenging to get (either it was not available, or it was in Japanese), and the study had to rely more on household questionnaires for data. Finally, time and resource limitations were considerable limitations to the study as the researcher would have wanted more time with both the Zimbabwe and Japanese peasants in order to understand them.