German model underpins UN's 2012 'Year of the Cooperative'

Australia has created a coin to celebrate it, Mexico has emblazoned lottery tickets with its logo, and Germans the world over are happily providing examples of how they've made it work for their economy. The business breakthrough gaining attention is not some new technical invention, nor a scientific breakthrough, but rather a nineteenth-century economic model that seems to be making a comeback: the co-operative.
The United Nations recently declared 2012 the "Year of the Cooperative." Long associated with farmers and small tradesmen, the co-operative has entered the 21st century with its own internet domain extension - .coop - and a newly polished reputation appealing to socially-aware shoppers. But experts say co-ops not only embody the "doing well by doing good" mantra. They also offer a solution to global starvation and food spoilage in developing nations.
"Co-operatives could be a way for developing countries to provide the majority of their people with food," German author of "Co-operatives For Success," Berthold Eichwald, told dpa. "They bring small communities together, get everyone involved, and address problems that can't be solved by the market alone."
Eichwald and others noted that co-operatives have also helped empower women in Africa and in Southeast Asia. Though cooperatives vary slightly by country, they are generally thought of as member-owned business bodies addressing specific societal needs. By no means unique to Germany - agricultural co-ops are widely popular in Japan and France, for example - Germans consider cooperatives a bedrock of their powerhouse "Mittelstand" small- and medium-sized business sector, which accounts for 99.7 of all companies and nearly 61 per cent of all jobs.
For this reason, the country's NGOs and politicians plan to make the case for co-ops in events throughout 2012. "Year 2012 is an important year for Germany because the world-wide co-op movement was largely influenced by German thinking on co-operatives," President Christian Wulff said in a speech in November.
Some 20 million Germans - 25.5 per cent of the population - are members of some 7,200 co-ops in fields ranging from banking to medicine and service trades, according to the German Cooperative and Raiffeisen Confederation. Around 3.8 million Germans live in housing co-operatives, while about 16 million bank at credit unions.
Eichwald cited a credit union in Queensland, Australia - QT Mutual Bank, which recently gave its customers voting rights; and Bank Transfer Day in the United States, where 650,000 people moved to credit unions - as evidence of a global trend forming. In the United States, 91.7 million people keep nearly a trillion dollars at 7,491 credit unions, the World Council on Credit Unions said. In Australia, 3.4 million keep 53.4 billion dollars at credit unions.
Germans' zeal for co-ops extends beyond banks - into the drinks and energy sectors as well. This month, the head of organic fizzy drink maker Bionade, Rudolf Buehler, told the Taz newspaper that he wants to reform the company into a co-op. The move was seen as a drastic attempt to reingratiate the brand with customers and organic supermarket managers, who have dropped Bionade to protest its sale to processed food conglomerate Dr Oetker.
Meanwhile, in late November, a co-op of 154 Germans in the town of Rodershausen bought shares in a windmill project, at 500 euros (670 dollars) each. Though the 77,000 euros raised from the co-op stock offering was a far cry from the 25 million euros needed to begin construction, organisers told local media the co-op model brought locals - who would have to live next to the windmills - into the debate and gave them a profit motive for supporting the project.
Co-ops have become popular in the creative industries as well. In Cologne, Thomas Hann brought together 400 artists and designers to create a visual global talent agency that operates as a member-owned co-op, called The Seed. It has won large corporate clients like Hugo Boss and Nintendo, newspaper Handelsblatt reported. But why now all this talk of co-operatives? They are, after all, more than 100 years old. Berthold Eichwald believes it's down to the economy. Or, rather, the global economic crisis. "I think people realised during this crisis that short-term, shareholder-dominated thinking just isn't going to be enough anymore," Eichwald said. "We need a values-oriented system going forward."