Post by Dr. Jaroslava ("Jarka") Chloupková

A recent piece by Dr. Jerzy Plewa, former Director-General for Agriculture and Rural Development at the European Commission, on Polish agriculture and cooperation touches on one of the most important structural questions in European agriculture: how farmers convert production strength into market power. This question is not only about prices, subsidies or regulation. It is also about institutions, trust and bargaining power in the value chain. Farmers who remain fragmented often face processors, retailers and input suppliers individually. Farmers who are able to cooperate effectively can negotiate around volume, quality, logistics, storage, standards, branding and access to buyers. In that sense, cooperation is not a romantic idea of solidarity; it is a practical market institution. This also brings me back to my earlier comparative article, "Building and destroying social capital: The case of cooperative movements in Denmark and Poland", co-authored with Professor Gert Tinggaard Svendsen and Professor Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen. The Denmark–Poland comparison remains relevant because it shows that cooperation cannot simply be ordered from above. Where trust has been damaged, cooperation has to be enabled through credible, farmer-controlled structures that farmers see as economically useful. The policy lesson is still current: if we want farmers to capture more value, the debate cannot stop at production. It also has to address market organisation, social capital and the institutional conditions that allow farmers to act collectively without losing control.