Cooperative societies revive trust
Farmers and local authorities beginning to see benefits for themselves and village development
TERNOPIL — According to Mykhailo Mykolenko, the head of the Ternopil oblast council, developing cooperative societies is the way of the future for Ukrainian villages. He voiced this thesis in Zalishchyky, at an all-Ukrainian consultation workshop for cooperative societies. The idea received immediate confirmation from Ihor Marusiak, the head of Ratai, a local agricultural cooperative society, who said that the cost of plowing for the society’s members ranges from 120 to 150 hryvnias per hectare, whereas other farmers have to pay 200 hryvnias and in some villages, between 500 and 700 hryvnias.
The workshop participants indicated that one of the priorities for the local authorities is to revive peasants’ trust in cooperative societies. The leaders of the kooperatyva, as it was once called in Galicia, said that in 1990 their output was 100,000 tons of potatoes, 70,000 tons of meat, and up to 5,000 tons of early vegetables. Cooperative societies cannot be serious businesses now, as they have been forced into conditions that make them noncompetitive.
Mykolenko emphasized that during the workshop cooperative societies were discussed as a purely economic category. But he believes that they need to be linked with educational and political activity. He reminded the participants that in Ukraine cooperative societies were initiated in Kharkiv region by the Alchevskys, a family in which the father was a banker, his wife a teacher, and their daughter a poet.
No less interesting was a story about the village of Tovstoluh in Ternopil region, where Mykolenko has lived for 32 years. In 1924 Osyp Pavlyshyn, a Sich Riflemen colonel, returned to the village where he had grown up and worked as a teacher. The colonel found a devastated village with five taverns, where the local men were constantly getting drunk. In the whole village Pavlyshyn found only four men with whom he could talk about dragging the village back from the precipice. Within four years, once the collection of milk and its processing into cheese and butter were regulated, a butter-manufacturing union went into operation in Tovstoluh. After another four years a three-storey civic center was built in the village. But the main thing was that all the bars in the village went bankrupt, and only three men who liked to bend the elbow were left.
From now on the oblast council will provide assistance for the development of cooperative societies. Funds will be earmarked in the 2007 budget specifically for the purpose of supporting this undertaking in Zalishchyky and Kremenets raions.
Specialists recently concluded a study of cooperative societies in Vinnytsia oblast. In one raion an agricultural cooperative society paid 1.07 hryvnias per liter of milk to its members, whereas in Ternopil oblast third-party dealers paid peasants only 40 to 50 kopiikas per liter. To create a cooperative society, peasants need to be convinced of its efficiency and to make their contributions to the authorized capital.
It is difficult to win people’s trust. At first, the Ratai Cooperative Society, mentioned at the beginning of this article, had only 120 members but now the number has reached 400.
