Palmer, A1 as ka
Editor*.. •Dorothy M. Boll
Advertising.Harriot Z# Bell
Published onoe a week at Palmer, Alaska, for the Matenuska Valley Farm
ers* Cooperating Association for the purpose of giving news of the
Associations* work, problems, and accomplishments*
vl.00 for six months 10^ a copy
SUBSCRIPTION RATE ll*75
FUTURE OF CO-OPS
Louis H. Bean, Economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, chal
lenged the Annual Meeting of the Minnesota Association of Cooperatives
in St. Paul with these words
•*I* the past 25 years membership in farm marketing and purchasing co
operatives has about doubled. But it is important to note that this
growth was checked during the early 1930’s by the decline in agricultural
prices and business, that it was stimulated by the farm and industrial
recovery of 1933-1937, that membership fell off with the recession of
1937-38"and then expanded very vigorously during the war and post-war
veers.
‘•Now that agricultural prices have fallen from about 120 per cent of
parity during the war years to about parity, will the rate of growth in
cooperative membership, as well as the dollar volume of business, decline
as in past depressions, or will the undeilying momentum of the cooper
ative movement be strong enough to sustain cooperative activity at its
present high level?”
COOPERATIVES CANT STAND STILL
lorry Voorhis, Secretary of the Cooperative League of U.S.A.
'•’Cooperatives can’t stand still—especially in this kind of
s ays that
a world.
*If they try to do so, they start going backwards very quickly. One of
the soundest of all the so-called ‘‘Basic principles•* oi cooperation is
’constant expansion.’
•’This does not mean that every cooperative business in the country should
necessarily be acquiring new productive facilities every day or so. And
it certainly does "not mean that co-ops are to embark on an effort to
•take over” whole lines of business. Cooperatives need the healthy com
petition of non-cooperative business. They need it just as old-line
business badly needs--for its own good as well as that of the nation
the competition of co-ops.
•h-hat constant expansion does mean is something like this: cooperative
methods are too beneficial and too badly needed by this very distressed
world to be confined to their present scope in America. Co-op expansion
car not and must not stop until a sufficient percentage of the entire
national business is being done cooperatively, to fairly stabilize our
economy at a high level of income, production and consumption. Practical
experience in areas of our economy where co-ops have had a major impact
has repeatedly shown this percentage to be around 15 per cent to 20
per cent,
*Fundamental to co-op expansion is analysis of where and how such ex
pansion is related to the peoples’ needs. Cooperatives succeed only
whore they actually do meet a real need of their patrons. The basic
reason for the success of various kinds of farmer cooperatives is that
their services to rural people have been substantial, tangible, fairly
immediate and easily recognized.
‘’livery plan of world communism (and world fascism too) is based on the
assumption that sooner or later the .American economy will collapse* It
is the job of every .American to see that this does not happen.
"And the cooperators of the country have in their hands the ^’middle way1*
method of preventing that very disaster.
;’Today cooperatives are doing somewhere between 1.5 per cent #and two per
cent of the nation’s total business. (The figure is much higrier, of cours
in some agricultural lines.) That is only about one seventh or one-eighth
enough to bring to bear on the problems of our time the saving influences
which co-ops are capable of bringing. This is another way of graying
that co-ops won’t be ’’too bigft by any measuring stick until, taken as a
wholc> they are about seven times as big as they are now.”_