Toward to qualification as associative priority entity: different forms of integration of agri-food cooperatives

Abstract

The Act 13/2013, of 2nd of August, to promote the integration of cooperatives and other associative agri-food entities has created a new figure, the “Associative Priority Entity” whose requirements for recognition have been recently concretized through regulatory development carried out by the Royal Decree 550/2014, of 27th of June. This law seeks to promote the size increase of agri-cooperatives in order to be more competitive, due to the fact that they suffer from an obvious atomization, specially, if they are compared with the cooperatives of this sector in the Northern Europe. In order to achieve this aim, the Act 13/2013 uses as an incentive the granting of a preferential situation in the Rural Development Programmes Aids. Firstly, it will be made an analysis of the requirements needed to be qualified as “Associative Priority Entity”, such as the supra-regional nature of the resultant entity, reaching a certain threshold of turnover, etc. And, finally, it will be review the different ways of integration that can be used to achieve the necessary size to be recognized as an “Associative Priority Entity”.