Abstract:
Agricultural cooperatives play a crucial role in ensuring food security,
particularly for smallholder farmers in developing countries. The global growing
population leads to food security challenges; cooperatives have a niche intervention
to overcome food security challenges. The paper answer five questions which are;
what are the basic strategies used by agricultural cooperatives in improving food
security? How can agricultural cooperative engage in crop diversification? What is
the role of agricultural marketing cooperatives in improving household
nutrition? What are the available strategic challenges faced by agricultural marketing
cooperatives on their efforts to bring food security. The paper was based on
community empowerment theory; where cooperative societies play a crucial role in
achieving food security by empowering small producers. The paper adopts a
Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to critically explore the agricultural marketing
cooperatives roles in enhancing food security to build inference. The discussion
found that, cooperative can be and had been used to bring food security by extending
production, education of food production and the adoption of climate smart
agriculture. Also, cooperatives were found t the good model in advancing nutrition to
smallholder farmers based on different programs. However, cooperative was faced
with challenges on innovation, technological adoption and education on scientific
farming. The paper concludes that, with education and awareness campaign on food
production capacity increase, the factor food security resilient can be feasible. It is
recommended that, cooperative movement need to be the ambassadors on developing
education package relation to advancing food security using agriculture marketing
models.
