The cooperative production model has increasingly come to define the development strategies of the “Bolivarian Revolution.” In its August 2005 report, SUNACOOP registered a total of 83,769 cooperatives, with more than 40,000 cooperatives created in 2004 and almost 30,000 more cooperatives formed in the first eight months of 2005. The total number of associates in October 2004 was 945,517, up from 215,000 in 1998.
This proliferation originates in the recognition of cooperatives throughout the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution as key economic actors within the nation’s social economy, portrayed as tools for economic inclusion, participation (article 70), and state decentralization (article 184). More significantly, the state is expected to “promote and protect” cooperatives (articles 118 and 308). It wasn’t until the Ley Especial de Asociaciones Cooperativas (Special Law of Cooperative Associations) was published in September 2001 that numbers started growing with almost 1,000 cooperatives in 2001, more than 2,000 the following year, and more than 8,000 in 2003.
AEVIA Reveals the Source