Agricultural experts have urged farmers to set up and join cooperatives to reap greater financial rewards for their toil and enjoy more protection under a market economy.

Currently a very small percentage of China's 700 million farmers take advantage of the benefits offered by collective organizations.

"Only about 3 percent of farmers have participated in such cooperatives in China," Scott Rozelle, a researcher with Stanford University, said at an international conference that ended on Thursday.

"In countries like Japan and South Korea, however, almost all farmers are members of a cooperative, because otherwise they can hardly survive in the competitive market," he said.

With 20 years' research experience in China, the US expert said that it was "surprising" to know "millions of Chinese farmers are still on their own", selling farm goods to hundreds of thousands of small traders.

Farmers' cooperatives are believed to give members greater bargaining power with retailers such as supermarkets, affording the former a bigger say in setting prices, said Huang Jikun, chief scientist at the China Agricultural Policy Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Farmers belonging to no organizations risk buying fake seeds and fertilizers at a higher price.

They also lose the chance of gaining profits from the packaging and transport of farm products, he said.

They have little access to credit and if prices fall against expectation, they must suffer the loss alone because insurers prefer to sign contracts with a cooperative rather than hundreds of individual farmers.

He said such organizations could increase farmers' earnings and narrow the rural and urban income divide.

In recent years, farmers' cooperatives reappeared, with totally different roles from what they played in the 1950s and '60s as a rural organization in a planned economy.

Now, cooperatives give farmers confidence.

Li Jiawen, 55, a bee farmer in Beijing's Miyun County, said he received free technical training and was guaranteed quality bees and other tools from the cooperative.

"These all made me feel safe and assured. And we have a chance to share out profits if our cooperative's own branded bee honey products sell well in supermarkets," said Li, who raised bees for 30 years and joined the local bee farmers' cooperative in 2005.

Not only farmers, but also consumers benefit from such cooperatives indirectly.

Huang Jikun, the think-tank agricultural expert, said that the supply chain - from cooperatives directly to supermarkets - cuts the cost in transportation, allows room for price drops and makes products "traceable" when problems occur.

(China Daily March 7, 2008)