Israel · Agricultural cooperative system · NGO
AJEEC-NISPED
AJEEC-NISPED
Israeli COOPs — Seeing is believing
Presenter: Mully Dor, Chair of the Board, AJEEC-NISPED
Uses five Israeli cooperative case studies to argue that the regional cooperative model replaces the broker model with economies of scale — shifting the object of profit maximisation from the middleman to the farmer.
Key figures
- Israeli agricultural co-op output
- $5.2 billion
- Kibbutzim / Moshavim
- 274 / 254
- Members
- 260,000
- Galilee Export turnover
- $175M+
- About 10% YoY growth; roughly 75% of production exported.
- MAON turnover
- $110M
- Net profit $3.3M; 25% retained, 75% distributed — half equally, half by patronage.
- Manufacturing services co-ops
- 290 factories
- 10% of Israeli industrial manufacturing; $14bn sales, 75% exported, 4.5% R&D intensity.
Key points
- Galilee Export handles avocado, persimmon, citrus, lychee, mango, Medjool dates, grapes, peppers, carrot, pomegranate and peach/nectarine, and operates two of Israel's largest packing houses.
- MAON handles 175,000 tons of potatoes, carrots, baby radishes, onions and citrus annually as a regional post-harvest marketing cooperative.
- The deck's core is a comparison table contrasting the 'developing world model' with the 'Israeli economy of scale co-op model' across sales, marketing, finance, profit management and process improvement.
- The fundamental divergence is the objective function: under the broker model the middleman maximises his own profit and relies on government or investment capital; under the cooperative model the organisation maximises farmers' profits, uses only working-capital loans, and develops new services and R&D for farmers.
- AJEEC-NISPED is an Arab-Jewish NGO founded in 1998 by Israel's cooperative movement, working across disaster risk reduction, food security and climate change, health promotion, social empowerment and economic opportunity.
- Proposed avenues with ACFSMC: training and commercial exchange, sustainable development, post-disaster recovery, cooperative economic development and joint projects, and strategic partnership with cooperatives and NGOs.
Quotations
“Strengthen the cooperative as the best way to live, work, shop, bank, prosper, connect and grow.”
“Innovation and cooperation are the tools of the future in the 'Start-Up Nation'.”
Editor's note
The deck's banner headline reads '1 MILLION MEMBERS IN 4000 COOPs', a different basis from the 260,000 agricultural cooperative members cited in the body — the former appears to cover Israel's cooperative movement as a whole, the latter only the agricultural sector.