ETHIOPIAN COOPERATIVES 17
render vital services other than those related to agricultural marketing, including the following: (i) Expanding financial services in rural areas; (ii) Purchase of agricultural machinery, equipment and implements, and lease them to farmers; (iii) Setting up of small agro-processing industries where processed agricultural products with greater value added could be produced and (iv) Establishing various social institu- tions to provide different kinds of social services. (FDRE 2002, 59)
This thrust continues in the current poverty-reduction strategy, which explicitly emphasizes the need to support producer cooperatives as a means of strengthening and empowering smallholders’ market participation in the liberalized market environment (FDRE 2005).
Running parallel to this state-led promotion of cooperatives is the effort by civil society to encourage farmer organizations at the grassroots level. Dif- ferent types of these community-based organizations (CBOs) exist throughout Ethiopia, ranging from savings and credit associations that provide rural micro- finance services to groups that organize the marketing of such crops as honey and organic coffee. A motivating force behind the growth of CBOs is the exten- sive community of NGOs in Ethiopia. NGOs are important actors in Ethiopia: although their activities were generally limited to famine relief in the 1970s and 1980s, many are now working on issues related to sustainable agriculture and rural development. As of 2000, some 368 NGOs operated in Ethiopia, of which one-third were international organizations (Rahmato 2002).
Administrative Structures to Promote Cooperatives
In 2002, the GoE established the Federal Cooperatives Commission (now the Federal Cooperatives Agency, or FCA) with a broad mandate: to oversee the appropriate implementation of cooperative legislation, to design policies and legal procedures consistent with international conventions on coopera- tives, and to ensure the coherence of cooperative policy with other relevant sectors (land, labor and employment, customs and taxation, and financial regulations) (Lemma 2008). The FCA guides cooperative promotion efforts throughout the country, working through regional state Bureaus of Coopera- tive Promotion (BoCPs), whose mandate extends down to the woreda and kebele levels.2 Cooperative promotion efforts at the woreda level are man-
2 This allocation of responsibilities reflects Ethiopia’s wider process of political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization, introduced following the downfall of the Derg in 1991 and codi- fied in the 1994 Constitution. The process led to a novel reallocation of powers to the country’s nine regions and the urban administrations of Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa. Today each region and administration enjoys wide executive and legislative powers and is financed through a com- bination of transfers from the federal level and regional tax revenues.
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