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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in northeastern Slovenia, the paper examines farmers’ cooperation using a moral economy approach. The study shows how moral sentiments, perceived and evaded responsibilities, and market inequalities shape small-scale cooperation and limit large-scale collective action.

Paper long abstract

Farmers cooperate, for example, to facilitate harvesting and to strengthen local or international communities. Some rural cooperation has been encouraged by the Common Agricultural Policy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018–2022) in northeastern Slovenia, where agrarian economists have identified insufficient cooperation, this paper contributes to the perspective on the absence of cooperation by also examining how farmers do cooperate, even when such practices remain politically invisible or economically less significant. Using an interpretative approach to moral economy, which assumes that people experience their lives within complex processes of judgement involving moral, material, and social power differentials in relation to others, the analysis foregrounds moral sentiments regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions. The study shows that farmers increasingly associate cooperation with moral sentiments of betrayal, resentment, and unfairness. These are linked to the partial collapse of the Yugoslav cooperative system, experiences of unfair membership and management within cooperatives and joint sales in subsequent years, and are reinforced by the most recent subsidy system, widely perceived as favouring large agricultural market players. However, farmers do cooperate: in cooperatives across the state; in solidarity groups organised for work and socialising; in joint sales through courtyard shops; and in ecological farming. These forms of cooperation are usually relatively small-scale and niche, characterised by a strong entrepreneurial logic and the maintenance of individual autonomy. This aligns with farmers’ views that large-scale market cooperation is financially harmful, impossible due to market domination by agricultural companies, and politically undesirable as it reproduces existing inequalities.