Abstract
Since 1980's, Vietnamsese agricultural cooperatives are being transformed. Collective production is replaced with household farming. Legally, cooperatives are agricultural service institutions.
But before 1980's cooperatives substantially had roles of administration and selfgovernance too (especially in north Vietnam). Now some cooperatives maintain these roles, though others only fill agrucultural service roles.
This study analyzes accounting documents of one coopetative (Coc Thanh agricultural cooperative, Vu Ban district, Nam Dinh province) in 1995. The purpose is to give one example of cooperatives' validity and to search for reasons of this validity.
The analysis shows 5 points.
(1) Peasant households of this cooperative have to pay heavy taxes and other fees (particularly agricultural service fees to the cooperative). Taxes and fees on agricultural land amount to about 30% of average yield.
(2) These agricultural service fees to the cooperative are not only heavy but also consist of many categories (such as pump fee, coopetative administration fee, clop defense fee, veterinary fee, public peace fee, road maintain fee). This means the coopetative fulfills many and very important functions for household farming.
(3) System of assigning taxes and fees to each household is very complicated. The cooperative can completely follows this system. Its ability of keeping accounts seems very good.
(4) The cooperative perfectly collects almost all the taxes and fees. Its business ability is very good.
(5) This cooperative maintains some roles other than agricultural service, for example: collecting taxes and fees, building and repairing roads, farming some cash crops and so forth.
Coc Thanh cooperative is one of most active cooperatives in Viet Nam. It carries out numerous agricultural services with good ability. It maintains other roles: administrative roles like collecting taxes and building roads and role of managing cash crop production.
Of course this activeness owes much to its maintaining the caracter before 1980's. But there are other reasons: conditions of agricultural production in this area, ability and policy of local administrative institutions, and peasants' way of adapting themselves to market economy.
