Research Article
Manoj Sharma
Abstract
Cooperatives are community-based autonomous organization which is member-owned, managed, and controlled. The cooperative model of production and marketing at the grassroots (i.e., community) of Nepal is seen as an instrumental strategy towards sustainable agricultural development. The persisted cooperative movement of Nepal up to 1991 and break through as cooperative act has helped to alleviate poverty through empowering the poor community at institutional, economic and social level through employment generation, increasing incomes, improving health, education and sanitation, women’s empowerment, better physical infrastructure, and also due to food security. Despite of these impressive outcomes of cooperatives, there are still a lot of lacunae to be addressed at different aspects like managerial, policies, human resource management, R&D and so on. Thus, the attitudes of government and the generality of the people must be changed positively towards cooperative development since it will be too difficult to achieve a meaningful balanced development without involving abundant small farmers, for whom cooperative approach is highly contributively to capture economies of scale.