CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Agricultural cooperative is a system by which farmers or associated agricultural related workers or business men are organized to help members increased their productivity and profit from their business. Agricultural cooperative engage in the production, marketing, processing and distribution of agricultural products. Therefore, all the cooperative societies that operate in the agricultural sector are engaged in these different operations belong to the group of agricultural cooperative.
In Imo State most inhabitants survive through agriculture and their main occupation is subsistence farming which attracted the interest of many cooperative societies, both the old and new ones. Increasing the agricultural productions was their main target and at the same time lifting the level of it size and qualities. Most of the crop couldn’t grow well in other to product that was several affected were coca yams, vegetables cassava stems, yam tubers, and other root crops.
The constraints to increased agricultural production through cooperative societies Igobo (1996) said. It is now on the government that dependence on the external sources of fund because it has ties their independence to the uncertainties of ridiculed.
1.1 GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY
Cooperative movement all over the world has been considered or taken as both means and instrument of development whereby individual as group of people with common socio-economic come together mutually to take and solve their common socio-economic problems. In our country today, sources of statements have been made in the newspapers and how others news media by scholars advocating the use of cooperative societies for the development and increasement of standard of living of the rural people.
In Nigeria, over 60 percent of populations are involved in agriculture. The green revolution as conceived in Nigeria was a cell for an accelerated increase in agricultural production through radial modernization of agriculture by removing all the known constraints to increased production and the provision of needed inputs and agricultural mechanization.
Moreover, many programmes has been introduced by the federal government in support of development agricultural in rural area such as Agricultural Development Project (ADP), National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), Directorate of Food, Road and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), Better Life Programme (BLP), National Accelerated Food Production (NAFP), Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) etc, Recently, “the Family Support Programme (FSP) was introduce by the Federal Government with the aim of increasing the life of the rural dwellers through the formation of Cooperative movement .
Cooperative movement spans through many aspect of our economic life such as production consumption, distribution, thrift saving and the provision of rural infrastructures.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Nigeria has embarked on various programmes and policies costing hundred of millions of naira aimed at reviving the depressed agricultural sector.
In view of this agricultural cooperative was instituted so as to organize the small scale farmers who are still involved in manual labour type of farming in cooperative and had failed to produce enough food for our teaming population thereby forcing the country to be involved in importation of large quantity of food with a huge percentage decline in agricultural experts.
All these government efforts have not actually had much significant increasement in this sector, as much emphasis is now being placed on agricultural.