Las cooperativas agrarias en la provincia de Misiones (Argentina)efectos de la globalización en sus estrategias organizacionales y productivas

Abstract

During the last decades the process of globalization has had as its distinctive feature the worldwide spread of policies conforming to a neoliberal economic model to which peripheral capitalist economies would submit to, conditioned by the need to meet their international liabilities. Encouraged by financial institutions, the measures promoted determined that many national states -among which, many Latin American countries- would reduce state functions, privatize public enterprises, deregulate and open their markets to international trade, thus enabling access to alternative financial sources to favor an accelerated growth of their economies. Nonetheless, the weakening of States' regulatory role was decisive in the sense that these policies generated economic concentration, unemployment, social exclusion and poverty, dramatically deferring the aspirations and needs of major sectors of their population.In order to address the critical effects of the new economic model established, those left behind in the distribution of resources and opportunities resorted to alternative ways of organization, namely, the 'social economy enterprises'. Among them, the cooperative system played a key role. In the process of adapting to the demands for greater competitiveness and production quality, cooperative societies -which are both cooperative associations as well as competency companies- were soon forced to develop new structural strategies to keep up with their usual role, thus compromising their principles (cooperative drive and institucional goals) and exerting high impact in their organizational and productive practices.