Agricultural cooperation as a factor in sustainable rural development

Abstract The efficiency of production in the agriculture domain directly affects the socio-economic development of the country, the rural areas. Recently, agricultural cooperation has been held high regard among all the factors of sustainable development of the agricultural production. That allows achieving financial stability of an agricultural enterprise, increasing the labor productivity in it, and reducing production costs. On the other hand, it promotes the development of rural settlements and employment there; therefore, conducting research in the agricultural cooperation field is so relevant. The purpose of the research is to study the development of agricultural cooperation in Russia and identify the problems that hinder the cooperative movement development; and suggest the main directions for further development in the field of cooperation over the country. A variety of methods have been used to study the processes and phenomena in the field of organizational and economic relations, such as analysis and synthesis, reliance on systemic and logical approaches to study the trends in the development of agricultural cooperation, besides using the graphic interpretation of theoretical information and the empirical data. This work takes into consideration the granting support for cooperatives. In addition, it defines the main problems and conditions of the cooperatives’ effective performance and suggests directions for further development of cooperation.