How are young farmers in a cooperative involved in rural projects?

By César Marcos Cabañas, Food and Agriculture Journalist.

Priority Associative Entities (EAP) are cooperatives that work daily to create, maintain and improve a professional structure at the service of a sector that encompasses the entire agri-food value chain, but also motivates their younger members to actively participate in their cooperatives , modernize your activity and can create employment. These roles have been analyzed by women and young men of EA GROUP in several recently held conferences. The main conclusion is that they claim to be reliable interlocutors of the rural territories in which they live for society.

The rural world is facing a great dilemma: either to modernize or run the risk of disappearing the social and productive model that has maintained it throughout the ages. 13% of the rural territory in Spain accuses serious problems of depopulation, according to the National Rural Network of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Young farmers, women and men, cooperative partners of the EA GROUP Priority Associative Entity, have stressed in several days the need to become more involved in projects related to rural territory, improving their communication and social media skills, increasing their ability to influence the decision making of the EAP and in the design of the future cooperative model.

“It is very important to have the celebration of this type of debate day so that the youngest are aware that the cooperative model as a vertebrate formula must be disseminated and promoted, especially the figure of an EAP,” said Juan Carlos Pozo Crespo, CEO of EA GROUP.

In the conference real cases have been exposed. There we work on the involvement of cooperative members to create, maintain and improve a professional structure at the service of a sector from production to final product marketing. Speakers and experts have given examples of how investments are made to incorporate added value to the products that are marketed, open new markets, establish agreements to provide medium and long-term stability to partners in marketing their productions, generate knowledge through R & D & I projects, transfer technology to producers, make relevant the role of cooperative women and their empowerment in the governing councils of cooperatives, create direct employment and improve communication for society.

“We must work the pride of being a farmer, to contribute to their peoples are not abandoned, to maintain the environment and to be ambassadors of the rural environment to the media and civil society,” said Beatriz Agudo, director of R + EA GROUP D + i.

The young cooperatives have stressed that it is time to imply and propose changes adapted to their needs of the cooperative model designed by their parents and grandparents. In addition, farmers must be integrated, in this case, in social projects as a solution to the problem of generational relief and rural depopulation. Business training is a very demanded factor for them.

Another of the requests is the incorporation of new technologies that facilitate and make more efficient the hours of work invested by the producers and transmit information of new markets that can be reached and the way in which the EAP opens opportunities for farmers in ecological.

In short, it is about cooperative women and men becoming reliable interlocutors in rural territories with people who today are opinion makers nationwide. Thus, the EAPs will be able to transfer a reality from the field that today is not understood if it is not based on commercial projects in groups and of greater scope than the merely handmade and local.