Agriculture and Rural Cooperation: Examples from Armenia, Georgia and Moldova

This paper was prepared within the “Cooperatives and their alternatives” component of the Agrarian Structures Initiative (ASI) which a regional program of FAO in Europe and Central Asia. This paper outlines some of the main issues influencing the development (or not) of farmer and rural organisations and presents in further detail the specific situation in Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. All three countries returned ownership of the majority of land to the rural population. This resulted in lar ge numbers of landowners managing relatively small and often dispersed land plots, but each of the three countries followed different paths to the development of agriculture and rural cooperation.