Impacts of Changing Environments on Primary Agricultural Cooperatives and Redirections for Its Structural Improvement

단위농협(單位農協)의 환경변화(環境變化)와 조직(組織)의 발전방안(發展方案)

Since domestic and international environments has changed rapidly, Korean primary agricultural coopratives are expected to face many difficulties in business management, especially marketing and banking business. Therefore, it is necessary to reframe the exitsting structure of primary agricultural cooperatives so as to enhance the competitiveness in terms of management efficiency. However, There are many problems to be solved such as overnumbered staffs compared with decreasing number of farming population, unbalanced ratio between executive officials and lower-level officials, complexity of position-ranking system resulting from unclearness of official title and office regulations, and management right excessively concentrated on cooperative leader. The suggested measures for such problems are as follows; 1) attaining the economy size of agricultural cooperaitves in line with decreasing rural community, 2) fostering the on-the job training programs and the personnel administration according to job competency, 3) merging the small primary cooperatives into larger units with efficiency, 4) specializing the cooperative business based on their regional comparative advantage, 5) maintaining the rational adjustment between elected cooperative leader's management right and responsibility.