CÍMLAP
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CONTENTS, INTRODUCTION |
Contents
1. Introduction
2. General description of the importance of collective farmers' marketing in Hungary
2.1. Historical context
2.2. Present situation and trends: General configuration of collective farmers' marketing
2.3. Conclusions
3. Characterisation of the main forms of collective farmers' marketing in Hungary
3.1. Different forms of collective farmers' marketing
3.2. Individual characterisation of each 'main' form
3.2.1. The group of giants: The integrators
3.2.2. EU conform producers' co-operations
3.2.3. Alternative bottom-up co-operations
3.3. Conclusions on the identified different main forms
3.4. The importance of some broad forms of cofamis in Hungary
4. Contextual factors that affect the emergence and performance of COFAMIs
4.1. Description of the different contextual factors from a scientific perspective
4.1.1. Political and institutional factors
4.1.2. Economic and market factors
4.1.3. Technical and Knowledge factors
4.1.4. Social and cultural factors
4.1.5. Geographical factors
5. Summary of the main points of the country report
References
Introduction
The cooperation and collective action of farmers has been a very important element of the European agriculture and rural development both decades ago and now. The COFAMI research project (Encouraging Collective Farmers Marketing Initiatives) financed by the EU 6th Framework Programme aims at identifying the social, economic, cultural and political factors that limit or enable the formation and development of collective marketing initiatives. The research activities involve an assessment of the positive and negative effects of existing policy, and attempt to determine the most appropriate level of policy formulation and implementation for supporting collective marketing initiatives (COFAMIs). In this paper, we discuss the present situation of collective farmers marketing initiatives in Hungary as a part of the COFAMI research project mentioned above.
In the first chapter, we discuss the historical background of COFAMIs. We argue that the Hungarian agriculture has a dual structure. Large estates producing for the Hungarian and international market were characteristic before World War II, but there were many small farms too that produced mainly for self-provisioning. Big state farms, cooperatives and small-scale, croft farms became typical after the collectivization in the sixties. Today big private farms, medium size enterprises and small family farms for self- provisioning still exist, although their interests and possibilities are different, which is a very important factor of establishing and developing COFAMIs. Then we analyze the current situation of farmers' co-operations, which can be characterized by three main types of initiatives: (1) new types of co-operatives and enterprises, (2) big integrator organizations and (3) alternative types of bottom-up initiatives with the original aim of collective producing and marketing. We present two brief case studies per main types to illustrate the most important differences among them. Finally, the limiting and enabling factors of COFAMIs follow.
The study builds on literature review, document analysis and a national stakeholder forum organized by the Institute for Political Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the 30 th of June 2006, where farmers, professional consultants and representatives of Hungarian COFAMIs discussed the first results of the status quo analysis.
The research partners define collective Farmers' Marketing Initiative (COFAMI) as follows: COFAMI means the activity of a group (or groups) of farmers when marketing their commodities and products. Through this form of collective action, they want to maximize utility on the market when facing local, national or transnational agricultural commodity buyers, food processors, distributors, and retailing. COFAMIs share the following characteristics: they focus on collective action, they build on active farmers' involvement, they have a marketing orientation and they are innovative in product characteristics, strategy of organisational form. We use the word COFAMI in the same meaning during the whole study.