Public goods, co-operatives

Szabó, Zoltán

Keywords: Common Agricultural Policy, social services, producers’ communities, co-operative principles and values, legislation

Within the approach of the draft proposal of the CAP towards 2020 has been a sig-nificant focus on “greening” in terms of the creation and protection of freely accessible public goods that are expected by society as a whole from agricultural activity. The re-quirements of “greening” in this draft serve conservation and the protection of the pub-lic goods that appear or are characterised as related to the production of the biological and physical environment. At the same time the general concept of public goods can-not be limited to the assets of material items. In this sense, some social services, such as intangible assets, are themselves public goods if their general feature is that the ac-cess to these services is without any loss of rivalry and exclusion.
The encouragement of producers’ co-operation, and the ideas for LEADER commu-nities, are considered as having such a character amongst rural development measures of the proposed CAP between 2014 and 2020. The rivalry and exclusion-free access to the services of these measures is most feasible if, during their implementation, the as-pects laid down in the principles of international cooperatives will apply. Therefore, re-lated to calls for European Union funds for the Hungarian agriculture and rural devel-opment plans, between 2014 and 2020 it is essential that the national legislation rec-ognising the relationship between public goods and cooperatives modifies the coopera-tive law, in which these principles are currently not enforced in full.

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