ETHIOPIAN COOPERATIVES 21
is explained by the expansion of cooperatives in Tigray, where cooperative prevalence grew from 12 to 83 percent during 1991–2005. As of 2007, there were more than 23,000 primary cooperatives in Ethiopia, with membership totaling more than 4.6 million (Table 2.3). These figures, however, include urban as well as rural cooperatives.
In Table 2.4, we use data from the ESCS (2005) survey to investigate the actual prevalence of agricultural cooperatives in rural areas; we show the per- centage of households participating in at least one cooperative involved in agriculture. As indicated in column 1, only 9 percent of all farm households report participating in a cooperative at a national level. We also note signifi- cant differences in membership rates across regions: 20 percent of the small- holders in Tigray region participate in cooperatives, whereas less than 4 percent of people in the SNNP region participate. Part of this variation is driven by differences in the level of access to cooperatives. Thus, as reported in col- umn 3 of the table, 88 percent of smallholders in Tigray have at least one coop- erative in their kebele, compared to less than 20 percent in SNNP. However, even when there is an organization in their kebele, smallholders in SNNP are still less likely to participate in cooperatives: only 9 percent participate—below the national average of 17 percent (column 5 in the table).
Descriptions of Agricultural Cooperatives in Ethiopia: Data and Narratives
Boxes 2.1 and 2.2 describe two agriculture marketing cooperatives encoun- tered during fieldwork. They are characteristic of the diversity and hetero- geneity found among cooperatives in Ethiopia and help to illustrate some of the issues being raised in this study. Table 2.5 shows that Ethiopian coopera- tives are engaged in a vast array of activities. Multipurpose and savings and credit cooperatives are the most prevalent, followed by housing and small/ medium enterprise cooperatives. (Note, however, that these figures include both rural and urban cooperatives; the vast majority of housing and small/ medium enterprise cooperatives are urban.) From these figures, one can estimate that about one-third to half of the cooperatives in the country are directly involved with agriculture.
Focusing on those cooperatives with an agricultural emphasis, we use the ECS (2006) data to provide average characteristics of grain-marketing coop- eratives in the four main regions of the country (Table 2.6). These organiza- tions are rather large, with average membership close to 1,000 (ranging from 21 to 3,664 members). Land cultivated per member averages 1.75 hectares, a figure that is consistent with the notion that cooperative members are largely smallholders, although not necessarily the smallest, as the average
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