Internal analysis of catalan agrarian cooperatives since a comparative perspective: the oil sector and the sweet fruit sector

Abstract

With the aim to develop strategies that allow improving the cooperatives competitive position, is necessary to realize an analysis of these organizations. Agricultural cooperatives, as the rest of business, are affected for changes. Thus it is necessary to know his strong and weak points with the purpose to detect as their opportunities as their threats. Until now the main objective of the cooperatives has been the products commercialization. However, the new socioeconomic situation poses the need that these organizations assume new objectives, such as the quality improvement, the environment conservation, new sales strategies, production diversification, etc... This present paper analyses the general characteristics of the cooperative sector in Catalonia with the aim to see which degree of prominence has in the subsequent phases to the production. In order to do this, we have realized a comparative study basing in different aspects of the internal structure of sweet fruit as well as olive oil cooperatives.