Crisis por cooptación del cooperativismo agrario en Canarias: una interpretación desde la geografía agraria

Abstract

The crises of the Canarian agricultural cooperatives have been cyclical, coinciding with periods of general economic recession, but they had never previously reached the magnitude of that of 2008. Given the effective economic, social, and territorial importance of this type of entity for the future of the local primary sector, this article aims to understand how the current situation has been reached. Cooperatives, being part of the social economy, are an instrument that can promote rural development, and in this sense they are necessary. The question is who manages them economically, socially, and politically. We propose that the cooperatives have been co-opted by an alliance of large rentier owners and large companies who market agricultural exports and sell to the regional internal market. In this process, small family farms play a subordinate role within Canarian cooperatives, and this distorts the very objectives of this associative system. The consequence is a reduction of the cooperative fabric due to a loss of members and the closure of the cooperatives, at the same time as numerous family farms go bankrupt and disappear.